Wild Nights!: New Stories (Art of the Story)

Overview: Award-winning author, Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 and grew up in upstate New York.While a scholarship student at Syracuse University, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. She graduated as valedictorian, then earned an M.A. at the University of Wisconsin.In 1968, she began teaching at the University of Windsor.In 1978, she moved to New Jersey to teach creative writing at Princeton University, where she is now the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway---Joyce Carol Oates takes on each of these literary giants in her newest story collection, powerfully and playfully reinventing the stories of the days leading up to their deaths. Unapologetically fictional--but digging deeper psychologically than many true accounts would dare--Oates’s stories offer tantalizingly imagined glimpses into the inner minds of these familiar writers. Through the words of his own “diary,” we watch as Poe succumbs to existential loneliness during a sociological experiment in an isolated lighthouse, stranded for a year with no companion but his faithful dog...Dickinson is brought back to life in an imagined future era, when a husband and wife buy her as a servant-robot/clone, eager for her to write her charming verses while she does the chores...Samuel Clemens (Twain) dotes on his “Angelfish,” a group of young girls aged 10-15 who he insists should call him Grandpa and on whom he lavishes endless gifts...Henry James volunteers in a British hospital during WWI and struggles to overcome his revulsion at the wreckage of the soldiers’ bodies only to discover something new and dangerously beautiful in himself...And in the final story, with Papa Hemingway hunched over a table late at night with a shotgun to his chin, we trace back over his angry, chaotic life, his tumultuous relationship with his father and his wives...Writing in the trademark words and style of each of these authors, Oates has created a dark, lively, and controversial work of ventriloquism that shows us these literary legends in a new and fascinating light. New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates’ imaginative look at the last days of five giants of American literature, now available in a deluxe paperback edition in Ecco’s The Art of the Story Series. Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in this work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is “genius.” Darkly hilarious, brilliant, and brazen, Wild Nights! is an original and haunting work of the imagination. Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway'Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is "genius." Darkly hilarious, brilliant, and brazen, Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination Through the words of his own 'diary', this title shows how Poe succumbs to existential loneliness during a sociological experiment in an isolated lighthouse, stranded for a year with no companion but his faithful dog. It also includes stories about Dickinson; Samuel Clemens (Twain); Henry James; and Papa Hemingway.