Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

by Joyce Carol Oates Narrated by Susan Ericksen

Overview

A new collection of critical and personal essays on the writing life, from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates.

“Why do we write?”

With this question, Joyce Carol Oates, in this new collection of seminal essays and criticism, begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities. 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 writing room.

Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates's novels as well as her nonfiction will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon 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.”

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2016 - AudioFile

Renowned literary writer Joyce Carol Oates shares her thoughts on writing and reading in what could be called her literary memoir. Narrator Susan Ericksen captures Oates’s essence with great style and clear enunciation. The collection of writers Oates discusses is eclectic—H.P Lovecraft, John Updike, Larry McMurtry, and Margaret Atwood, to name a few. With each author she explores a particular work, framing its significance within his or her previous works and the culture in which it was produced. There’s a haughtiness to Eriksen’s delivery, which aligns with Oates’s linguistic flourishes. The author delves deeply into the abstract, and Eriksen is there to make her meaning clear through pacing and emphasis. L.E. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Review

2016-07-31
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170009190
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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