Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway
by Joyce Carol Oates

Hosted by Frances Ferguson, Mary Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Arts and Sciences,
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English

"Wild Nights!: Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway is a collection of short stories that puts Joyce Carol Oates's remarkable versatility, empathy, and wit on display. Oates has attended so closely to the styles of the last days of the five writers that she seems able to speak their words and think their thoughts with a force that goes beyond accuracy."

— Frances Ferguson,
Mary Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Arts and Sciences,
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English

 

How to Participate

Listen to the audio introduction with the faculty host (34:58)
Read the transcription of the recording
Join the online discussion through JHU inCircle.

About this Month's Selection

In Wild Nights!, Joyce Carol Oates has produced a collection of stories that prompts us to think about the relationship between a writer's literary work and that writer's life. Although she has relied on information from the biographical accounts we have of the five writers, she captures their styles of seeing the world—so that anyone who has read much of their work will experience a shock of recognition in the face of characters who seem already familiar. By beginning two of the stories—"Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-house" and "EDickinsonRepliLuxe"—after the writers' deaths, Oates raises questions about exactly when a writer's life effectively ends. How do fame and public recognition affect a writer's life? Although Oates is at her most wickedly clever in her fantasy about a couple who buy an Emily Dickinson robot that continues to do and say Emily Dickinson-like things in their suburban New York home, in all of them she makes us wonder about the possibility of continuations and new beginnings. She uses these stories as occasions for imagining that the writers' last days may involve a contraction and darkening (as in "Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906" and "Papa at Ketchum, 1961") or an opening to a new sense of emotional vitality (as in "The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 1914-1916").