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.
***
[7 October 1849. Ah, waking! - my soul filled with hope! (POE POSTHUMOUS: OR THE LIGHT-HOUSE)]***
(Ecco, 6 October 2015, first published 1 January 2008, paperback, 272 pages, bought from @AmazonUK)
***
***
The first three stories in this collection, The Light-House, EDickensonRepliLukze and Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906 are the best. They lie easily among JCO's best stories. My absolute favourite was The Light-House in which Poe, isolated as a light-house keeper gradually and painfully loses his mind and succumbs to darkness and insanity. I had chills. EDickensonRepliLukze is very funny, futuristic tale in which a man buys an Emily Dickenson replica robot for his wife, a fan of the poet and his wife starts to lose her grip on reality. Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906 is a disturbing take in which an ailing Mark Twain develops unhealthy attachments to under-age girls, losing interest when they reach puberty. This story gave me the creeps. I don't want to think Mark Twain might have been a child molester but this is apparently based on facts. The other two stories were very good just not quite a brilliant as these three.
