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| Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway | 
| Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Ecco
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $11.35
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New (37) from $11.35
Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 36268
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0061434795
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780061434792
ASIN: 0061434795
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: CHARITY SALE!!! New book in mint condition. 100% of the proceeds benefit the literacy efforts of Books for America.
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Wild nights--and last days July 1, 2008
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
Joyce Carol Oates notes where the title for this volume comes from, as she quotes verse from Emily Dickinson:
"Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!"
This is a book, as the subtitle indicates, about the "Last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway." As such, there is considerable idiosyncrasy and fantasy here. Poe's and Dickinson's last days, of course, were nothing as portrayed here. However, each short story does capture something of their minds and possibly of, in Poe's case, his state of mind "at the end."
There are five stories of endings. Some are fairly "realistic," whatever that term might mean. There is Hemingway. His story begins with his suicide, and then following thereafter is a set of vignettes letting the reader know something of his personality and thinking. Not an altogether pretty picture, whether imagining shooting his father, his macho views of women, his self-loathing as he ages and cannot perform (artistically or physically) as once he could, his disdain for his fourth wife. And always that self-loathing. His drinking? As Oates mentions as Hemingway is depicted as helping with the funeral/burial of his father (who also committed suicide) (Page 207): "Afterward he did in fact get damned good and drunk and the drunk would last for thirty years." A not-very-flattering picture, but the rage and all else seemed to push him to his inevitable end. A powerful piece of work in this book.
Then there is the science-fiction/fantasy story of the last days of Emily Dickinson. She appears here, actually, as a "replicant," smaller than life. A couple with a rather dead marriage purchase her to pacify the wife but also provide something new in the household. The arc of the story, as the reader begins to detect, is going to end up with unhappiness. The ending is ambiguous and telling, although the story does not "catch fire" as a whole.
And Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens. He is near the end of his life, he knows that he has lost his powers as a writer and recognizes the waning of his physical--and even mental--powers. One method for him to soldier forward is development of an Angelfish Club for girls 11-15. What he does is disturbing to the reader, as he uses these children for reasons of his own. In counterpoint to his strange attraction to the young is his cold relationship to his daughter, Clara, who only seems to want to capture his love and affection. This is a distressing and powerful story of "last days."
And the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, not fully convincing, and Henry James, poignantly done. . . .
All in all, a sort of "mixed bag." Some of the stories are genuinely compelling; others are less convincing. As a collection, though, this volume leads to some degree of self-reflection. I caught myself wondering if I could possibly end up like a Hemingway (doubtful) or a Twain (hopefully not!) or. . . . Anyhow, despite some questions about this book, I would rate it worth taking a look at if the premise seems at all intriguing.
 Sad Nights June 20, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Wild Nights, the latest from Joyce Carol Oates, is a collection of five longish short-stories, each of which fantasizes about the end days of one of America's best known and most respected writers. As indicated by the book's complete title, there are stories about Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemmingway, in that order. And strangely enough, at least to me, the stories seem to have been ordered in such a way that each tops the previous one in degree of sadness the reader will feel on behalf of the author being featured.
Edgar Allan Poe, grateful for having been given the job of lighthouse keeper on Vina de Mar and looking forward to the complete isolation promised by his employer, comes to find that sanity is not an easy thing to hold onto when one's only companion is an independent little dog. Emily Dickinson's end days, as envisioned by author Oates, come in the twenty-first century, not in the nineteenth, and are bought and paid for by a couple who decide to make their home more intellectually interesting by purchasing a robotic replicate of Dickinson's talents, emotions, and memories. The very fact that "Dickinson" would face similar end days numerous times in different homes marks the story as an even greater tragedy than the one faced by Poe.
Next comes the story of Sam Clemens, forced to "perform" as the character Mark Twain in order to make a living because his royalties will not sustain his lifestyle any longer, and desperately unhappy since the deaths of his favorite daughter and his wife. His only comfort is the friendships he so desperately seeks with little girls between the ages of ten and fifteen, something that drives his daughter Clara crazy and that, even in early twentieth century America, had to be a little suspect. This story is more realistic than the first two and it more directly reflects the actual lifestyle of its subject, rating it an even higher notch on the "sadness meter," as a result.
But things get worse because of the way that Henry James, up next, has his days as a London hospital volunteer during World War I so bleakly imagined by Oates. Himself desperately suffering from a heart condition that made physical work dangerous, James, when not debasing himself allows another to do it for him in a most shocking way, a scene that will stick in my mind longer than I really want it to (and, no, it is not the one between James and his favorite male patient).
Ernest Hemingway is saved for last and, although his final days are more familiar to most readers than those of the other four authors, his story seems saddest of all. Oates manages to place the reader into Hemingway's mind in such a way that his ultimate suicide seems almost justifiable due to the man's inability to face the loss of both his physical and his mental powers. It is heartbreaking to see this lion of a man go down with only the slightest of whimpers.
Wild Nights is one of those rare collections of which I will easily remember each of its stories for a long time to come. Joyce Carol Oates has, in a sense, "humanized" each of her subjects by emphasizing their weaknesses, the same weaknesses that, in combination with their particular strengths, made these writers the geniuses they were. Each of her stories mimics the writing style of the author being featured, part of the fun, and yet, part of the sadness that blankets the entire book. I'm not sure what motivated this particular book, nor what Ms. Oates hoped to accomplish by writing it, and I hesitate to recommend it to others because I don't know how other readers will react to the extreme "realism" at its heart. Those afraid to have the images they carry of these authors in their heads changed might best avoid the book because change they certainly will. But those willing to take a chance on it will likely find it to be a book they will always remember in great detail.
This one won't cheer you up, but I guarantee you that this time next year you won't have a hard time remembering what it was about.
Oates at her virtuosic best! May 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In these five stories, Oates imagines the final days of five iconic American writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. Each of these is both an homage to the writer, and an often ironic look at his or her work. The Poe story, for example, was suggested by a one-page draft Poe left behind at his death, and the result is certainly something we might imagine Poe writing. Similarly, the Hemingway story has the cadence and repetition of his prose. The Twain finds the old man fixated on young girls, and dealing with the consequences of that fixation. But my favorites are the Dickinson and James stories. "EDickinson RepliLuxe" finds the poet turned into a reduced scale robot and adopted by an unhappily married couple, while the James story (the most genuinely moving of the five) finds the aging writer working as a hospital volunteer in London during World War One, falling in love with his handsome yet horribly injured patients. This collection is further demonstration of what a genuinely brilliant writer Oates is: well worth reading!
Life and death and life May 10, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This compelling new novel by Joyce Carol Oates may be her best. Lives stretched on by days and degree, Oates portrays five great American writers as heroes, rather than victims of their own collective demise. I was contemplating a favorite chapter but found myself coming up short. They're all good. Really good.
Poe and Hemingway seek a certain sort of attractive solitude, Dickinson is pumped full of oxygen, James, ever-needy, finds a way to fulfill his desires while Twain attains a new conquest of the sort we might expect. This is a wonderful book and Oates has captured each writer magnificently. I highly recommend "Wild Nights" for it is just that... a lasting look at what might have been.
Joyce Carol Oates' Tour De Force May 8, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In a recent phone conversation I had with a friend, she informed me that she had just finished Joyce Carol Oates' latest book. I replied that I had heard her read from it at an event in Atlanta not long ago. She asked: "What short story did she read from?" I find out then that THE GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER is not Ms. Oates' latest and have learned since then that WILD NIGHTS will be followed by a new novel to be published in June, MY SISTER, MY LOVE: THE INTIMATE STORY OF SKYLER RAMPIKE. She is nothing is not prolific. This collection of short stories is Ms. Oates' twenty-second book of short stories according to the list in the front of her latest. The publisher does not even bother to list novels, nonfiction, etc.
Ms. Oates has chosen five of America's best writers, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, to include in WILD NIGHTS (the title comes from an Emily Dickison poem). I would love to know how she selected these five and wonder what she would do with the "last days" of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner and Anne Sexton, for instance. Historical fiction-- if that's the word for it-- is not new to Oates. Her BLONDE, the fictional account of the tragic life and death of Marilyn Monroe is astonishing for how good it is and one of my favorite ten novels by an American writer.
Since it has been years since I have read either Poe or Twain, I cannot say as to whether Ms. Oates mimics the writing styles of those two writers-- I suspect she does-- although she certainly captures the horror of Poe's descent into madness reminiscent of his short stories. In what has to be the most macabre of any of the tales, "EDickinsonRepliLuxe," the poet comes alive in all her enigmatic reclusiveness. Ms. Oates is pitch perfect with the language in her stories about James and Hemingway from the former's dense, complex-worded prose to the latter's famous, often-copied terse, short unadorned sentences. Hemingway in his last days is the man we have come to think of, a chauvinist, in impotent depression, obsessed with guns and his reputation as the "greatest writer of his generation." His once womanizing good looks replaced by thinning, white hair. His definition of a wife cannot be written about in a g rated review. Clemens is old, tired of performing as Mark Twain, afraid that his writing muse has left him, is in perpetual grieving over the deaths of his wife and daughter and obsessed with young girls. In James, however, we see a loving, sympathetic side not usually associated with him as he volunteers at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London in World War I. James is chagrined that there are no odors "of human waste, gangrenous flesh" or "no names for such things" in either his novels or those his companions wrote. "In all of the Master's prose, not one bedpan." At first reticent to read to the wounded soldiers Walt Whitman's "more robust yet controversial verse, preferring Tennyson, Browning and Housman, James eventually comes to read Whitman aloud to the men, finding his work both "thrilling" and "suggestive."
Finally "EDickinsonRepliLuxe" rivals the chilling awfulness of Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant novel NEVER LET ME GO. The Krims, a couple married for nineteen years who now sleep in double beds, select a RepliLuxe, a life-like, almost life-sized replica of Emily Dickinson to bring new life to their sad existence. "There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time." What follows is a story like nothing else you will read.
In a recent interview Ms. Oates said that all these stories are about "wild nights - inchoate longings." I would add that each of these characters, although totally different, is terribly lonely. Surely no living writer writes so much so well and never repeats herself. Ms. Oates is one of our best.
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