Soul at the White Heat - Joyce Carol Oates

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 now in paperback. 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. Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates' 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. As the New York Times has said of her essays Oates's writing has always seemed effortless: urgent unafraid torrential. She writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn't look back.

TITLE: Soul at the White Heat

AUTHOR: Joyce Carol Oates

SKU: 9780062564528

PUBLISHER: HarperCollins Publishers Inc

DATE PUBLISHED: 02/11/2017

PLACE PUBLISHED: United States

PAGES: 400

BINDING: Paperback / softback

LANGUAGE: English

DIMENSIONS: 135 mm x 203 mm x 23 mm

WEIGHT: 282 gr