In rough country
Subtitle: essays and reviews
By: Joyce Carol Oates
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 396
ISBN-13: 9780061963988
Subjects: Criticism; History and criticism; American literature
Description: This new collection brings together some of Joyce Carol Oates's most brilliant and provocative pieces, covering a diverse range of subjects and ideas. The rough country is both the treacherous geographical/psychological terrains of the writers she analyses--Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and Margaret Atwood among others--and also the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [389]-396).
Table of contents: title: Classics. A Poe memoir ; The woman in white : Emily Dickinson and friends ; Cast a cold eye : Jean Stafford ; The art of vengeance : Roald Dahl ; Revisiting Nabokov's Lolita ; Shirley Jackson's witchcraft : We have always lived in the castle ; "As you are grooved, so you are grieved" : the art and the craft of Bernard Malamud ; "Large and startling figures" : the fiction of Flannery O'Connor ; Boxing : history, art, culture; title: Contemporaries. Remembering John Updike ; Homer & Langley : E.L. Doctorow ; In rough country I : Cormac McCarthy ; In rough country II : Annie Proulx ; Enchanted! : Salman Rushdie ; Philip Roth's tragic jokes ; A photographer's lives : Annie Leibovitz ; "The great heap of days" : James Salter's fiction ; Margaret Atwood's tales ; In the emperor's dream house : Claire Messud ; After the apocalypse : Jim Crace ; The story of X : Susanna Moore's In the cut ; "It doesn't feel personal" : the poetry of Sharon Olds ; Too much happiness : the stories of Alice Munro; title: Nostalgias. Nostalgia 1970 : city on fire ; The myth of the "American idea" : 2007 ; "Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?" : address upon receiving the 2007 Humanist of the Year Award ; In the absence of mentors/monsters : notes on writerly influences ; Revisiting Lockport, New York.