Soul at the White Heat, Joyce Carol Oates
Soul at the White Heat, Joyce Carol Oates
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Soul at the White Heat
Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrator: Susan Ericksen

Unabridged: 15 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/20/2016


Synopsis

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.”

About Joyce Carol Oates

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Eric on February 04, 2017

Joyce Carol Oates is such a prolific writer that it may surprise some of her readers to discover that she is also a committed and voracious reader. It’s easy to imagine the perennial question which Oates is asked “How do you write so much?” being quickly followed by “How do you read so much?” Soul a......more

Goodreads review by Janet on December 22, 2018

This collection of previously published essays, mostly book reviews which examine biographies, and sometimes autobiographies, of creative people--writers classic and contemporary, artists—there’s a review of a collection of the letters of photographer Alfred Steigliz and painter Georgia O'Keefe, lov......more

Goodreads review by Shane on September 21, 2017

This book is a treat for writers; written by a prolific writer, analytical reader, and dedicated teacher of the craft. Having made that pitch however, I would like to qualify that this book also appears to be a loose collection of essays and reviews, previously published in journals and newspapers, t......more

Goodreads review by Britta on September 30, 2016

Oates' new collection of essays - a compilation of her more recent literary criticism-essays (classics and contemporary authors) and some texts on the writing life - focusses on her quest to understand the source of a writer's inspiration, while analyzing and srutinizing her own writing and that of......more

Goodreads review by Paula on May 25, 2017

Is the uninspired life worth living? What are the five motives for writing? Let’s talk about the anatomy of a story. And, what kind of writing room do you have? This is the opening of an amazing book about writing, creativity, process, the Muse, and the human imagination. Not a fast read, I will tel......more