Wild nights! : stories about the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

SUMMARY: 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''—for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life?forms utterly alien to the poet's exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty-first century in a ''distilled'' state, a belated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet's verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned innocence, in the form of ''the little girl who loves you''; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hospital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master's fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a belated encounter with the ''profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him.'' Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer's memoirist work in the form of fiction. 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.