From Publishers Weekly
A bad joke says writing is easy if you don't know how to do it. This collection is a personal appreciation and piercing analysis of those who do it sublimely: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Jean Stafford, Roald Dahl (considered in his adult work), Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Claire Messud, and others. Oates is drawn to writers and themes that inform her own work, such as the gothic, the satiric, feminist theory, and a humanist bent that seems to have gone out of fashion. Readers of the
New York Review of Books, the
New Yorker, or
TLS will be familiar with these essays (though sometimes in different form or with different titles), divided into three parts—Classics, Contemporaries, and Nostalgias. Some essays—on the smothered brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer; on boxing; on Annie Leibovitz—are not strictly literary. In the Nostalgias section, Oates skewers American jingoism, notes the influence of Lewis Carroll on childhood, and returns to her source, Lockport, N.Y. Oates attributes the book's existence to the death of her husband of 48 years (reading gave shape to her uncharted life as a widow), but it is inspired as much by the subjects Oates so astutely describes.
(June 29) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Oates’ knowing and voluptuously inquisitive journeys through books reveal glimpses of her private self and map her inspirations and feelings of “kinship” with other writers. Her latest collection of reviews and essays is the most poignant, open, and trusting to date. The title, Oates tells us, refers to the imagined worlds limned by writers under her scrutiny, including Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Roahl Dahl, Margaret Atwood, and Annie Proulx. But “rough country” is also where Oates found herself when her husband of 48 years died suddenly in early 2008. Oates found solace in reading and in writing these illuminating and fluent essays. A relaxed yet erudite and exacting critic, she is nimble in her assessment of Nabokov and avidly forensic in her dissection of Salman Rushdie. Her keen eye extends to visual art, and her response to Annie Leibovitz’s retrospective exhibition and book, A Photographer’s Life (2009), is clarion. Most captivating and poignant are Oates’ personal essays, particularly her gracefully revealing portrait of Lockport, New York Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Times New Roman; mso-fareast-font-family:Times New Roman;}––a place crucial to her exceptional sensibility. --Donna Seaman
