Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates.
"Why do we write?"
With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer's inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer's best work?
In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author's own writing room. The New York Times Book Review has raved, "who better than Joyce Carol Oates . . . to explicate the craft of writing?" Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates's novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master.
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Joyce Carol Oates. (2016). Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Joyce Carol Oates. 2016. Soul At the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Joyce Carol Oates, Soul At the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life. HarperCollins, 2016.
MLA Citation (style guide)Joyce Carol Oates. Soul At the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life. HarperCollins, 2016.
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Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She 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.
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A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates.
"Why do we write?"
With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer's inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer's best work?
In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author's own writing room. The New York Times Book Review has raved, "who better than Joyce Carol Oates . . . to explicate the craft of writing?" Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates's novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master.
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August 15, 2016
This collection of essays, reviews, and lectures from a reigning doyenne of American letters is a bit of a hodgepodge, but taken as a whole provides an eclectic survey of contemporary American literature. Oates is likely most familiar to readers as a novelist (The Man Without a Shadow) and short story writer. But the author is also one of the U.S.'s keenest literary critics, as the works collected here demonstrate in abundance. The book's first section, "The Writing Life," contains a lecture and a trio of essays. These are generous and engaging, though Oates's Cassandra-ish warnings about the threat social media poses to literary culture may chafe more tech-savvy audiences. In the second section, "Classics," a standout is her invigorating dive into H.P. Lovecraft's contributions to genre and literary fiction. The third section, "Contemporaries," is the largest and most cohesive. Reading these selected reviews, one develops an acute sense of Oates's literary philosophy as she lovingly yet rigorously critiques works by a diverse set of authors, including Derek Raymond and Jeanette Winterson. The final section, "Real Life," contains just one essay and thus feels a bit tacked on, but the piece is a harrowing and thought-provoking work of reportage on a visit to San Quentin Prison, and is well worth readers' time.
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Another collection of sparkling literary essays from the prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction.Culled from her literary reviews in the New York Review of Books, the Kenyon Review, and other venues, these short essays probe the reasons we continue to read, both classics and contemporary works, and--despite the torture--write. Titling her collection after a smoldering line by Emily Dickinson, Oates (Humanities/Princeton Univ.; The Man Without a Shadow, 2016, etc.) finds enormous inspiration (and passionate literary obsession) in pursuing the answer to the age-old question, why do I write? In her initial essay, "Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living?" which establishes cohesion to the collection, she finds particular resonance with writers who grasp the essential subversive quality of literature--poets are often seized by a force beyond their control, being not in their "right mind," and "out of [their] senses," as Plato elucidates in Ion. (Poets, of course, were banned from the Republic because they could not conform to the authority of the state.) "Inspired" is akin to being "haunted" or "captivated," and in these far-ranging, occasionally didactic essays, Oates delights in authors who have been selectively obsessed and captivated by their material: Rebecca Mead by Middlemarch; Claire Tomalin by Charles Dickens; Julian Barnes harnessing "catastrophe into art" while writing of the death of his wife of 30 years in Levels of Life. Always eclectic, Oates also includes essays on the visionary detective fiction of Derek Raymond; Wild West fabler Larry McMurtry; Louise Erdrich's North Dakota novels, which Oates compares to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County cycle; and, most sensitively, Jeanette Winterson's memoir of coming out to her North England Pentecostal mother. Oates ends with a strange visit to San Quentin prison with a group of female graduate students--not to teach, however, but to feel shocked by the experience. As always, Oates is curious, probing, and memorably startling. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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April 15, 2016
After posing the question, "Why do we write?" the redoubtable Oates responds with a new collection of critical and personal essays.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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September 15, 2016
This collection of essays from the award-winning author Oates ranges from observations on the writing life to critical reviews of classic and contemporary works. Additional pieces include commentary on the film The Fighter and details of a visit to San Quentin prison. The selection of 33 previously published essays encompasses a wide range of topics with Oates's pinpoint focus. "Writing Life" essays detail the demise of the 3-D book in spite of her claim that most authors write because of their love of physical books and the stories and information they contain. Oates considers Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch and Mead's lifelong admiration for George Eliot. Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life is acknowledged for its literary craft for applying life to art. Observations on Larry McMurtry's The Last Kind Words Saloon recognize McMurtry's inclusion of "sharp-tongued wives and 'whores'" who match the men in the rough Texas environment. Additional authors critiqued include Jeanette Winterson, Anne Tyler, Zadie Smith, Lucia Berlin, J.M. Coetzee, and Paul Auster, among others, and, with a nod to Oates's love of boxing, Mike Tyson. VERDICT Oates's appreciation of books and reading while reflecting on the merit of contemporary authors is inspiring. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/16.]--Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates.
"Why do we write?"
With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer's inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer's best work?
In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J....
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