Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway [Hardcover]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

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.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this intriguing collection, Oates writes fictional death scenes for five canonical American writers, adopting elements of their signature styles with mixed results. The Poe story, written as a diary in the months after Poe's death, doesn't quite dole out its revelations with Poe-like abandon. Emily Dickinson's end is set not in 19th-century New England but in the 21st-century New Jersey suburbs, where an Emily Dickinson replicant, complete with enigmatical utterances, is purchased by a tax attorney and his wife to liven up the house, but ends up highlighting the banality of their existences. Samuel Clemens's death is set, menacingly, against his penchant for befriending adolescent girls, a habit deplored by his spinster daughter, Clara. The prize story, however, is Papa at Ketchum 1961, where Oates inhabits Hemingway's terse style to show the great man going down in a paroxysm of psychoses. This brutal turning of Hemingway against himself sparks a torrent of rage like that of early Oates novels such as Them. It marks an explosive ending to Oates's peculiar fantasy game, one that begs to be treated at length. (Apr.)
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Review

“…when tackling Wild Nights!...I found myself not only enthralled but transported.” (Washington Times )

“…an imaginative, impressive work that spotlights yet another side of Oates’ prodigious talent.” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch )

“Our most industrious writer back at the anvil, making her usual unholy racket, while simultaneously throwing off sporadic sparks of unalloyed brilliance.” (Kirkus Reviews )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061434795
• ISBN-13: 978-0061434792
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #921,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars `Literary Imitation Is The Highest Form Of Flattery', May 4, 2008

By 

Jon Linden (Warren, N.J. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (Hardcover)

In this book, Joyce Carol Oates, (JCO), really shows her skill as a writer. In these five tales, Oates alters the final years of five writers: Edgar Alan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens; Henry James and Earnest Hemmingway. She writes a tale that for some of them is a shocking view, but never without merit. Oates shows truly unique and incredible talent, as each one of the stories is as if written in the hand of the author she is describing.

For example, in E. A. Poe's case, she changes the scene of his death to a lighthouse off the coast of Chile. But the real beauty is in the way she imitates Poe, writing about Poe. In her story about Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens, she imitates his writing style, while being both autobiographical and biographical, inventing some very interesting outside interests that Mr. Twain indulged himself in, but not in an improper or truly ethically aberrant manner, if at least a little inappropriate. Twain's story is significantly epistemological as she utilizes a letter format in much of the story to move her point along, and since there is such a plethora of Twain correspondence, JCO can more easily transport herself into Twain in that writing style.

While her stories of Dickinson and James are equally fabulous pieces, she truly outdoes herself in her depiction of Hemingway, in his later life, married to wife number four, describing his suicidal ideations and attempts in a highly autobiographical tone, with a truly polished `Hemingway' manner that only a true expert in the writings of the man and the history of the man, could conjure eloquent execution of another author's writing style, while still keeping within her inner framework of the psychological school of writing. She analyzes and exposits the thoughts of that old and famous mind in her story, truly creating a manuscript that is worthy of Hemingway himself, and perhaps if the reader was unaware that it was not written by Hemingway, such a distinction might not ever be made, so fine is her imitative authorship and literary craftmanship.

This truly is a classic piece of JCO's writing talent and should be highly prized by JCO readers and literary students of all types, considering the 5 authors she has depicted. It truly is a fine work of creativity, which should be read and even studied for the things that Joyce finds within the minds and the hearts and the words of these great literary figures.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sad Nights, June 20, 2008

By 

Sam Sattler (Spring, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wild nights--and last days, July 1, 2008

By 

Steven A. Peterson (Hershey, PA (Born in Kewanee, IL)) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (Hardcover)

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.