In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

New
Paperback
2010
$18.37

Acclaimed for her novels and short stories, Joyce Carol Oates is also an unparalleled literary critic whose insights and commentary have graced the pages of such publications as the New York Review of Books , the Times Literary Supplement , and the New York Times Book Review . This new collection brings together some of her 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, Raymond Smith, after 48 years of marriage. As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace to the bereft as it was to me during the days, weeks, and months when the effort of writing fiction often seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime when I'd been younger, more resilient and reckless, Oates writes. Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can't sleep, has been the solace, for me, that saying the rosary or reading The Book of Common Prayer might be for another. The result of those meditations are the pieces of In Rough Country-balanced and illuminating essays that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form. As she engages with forebears and contemporaries, Oates provides clues to her own creative process, for prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood'. What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency.

Synopsis

Acclaimed for her novels and short stories, Joyce Carol Oates is also an unparalleled literary critic whose insights and commentary have graced the pages of such publications as the "New York Review of Books", the "Times Literary Supplement", and the "New York Times Book Review". This new collection brings together some of her 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, Raymond Smith, after 48 years of marriage. As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace to the bereft as it was to me during the days, weeks, and months when the effort of writing fiction often seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime when I'd been younger, more resilient and reckless, Oates writes. Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can't sleep, has been the solace, for me, that saying the rosary or reading "The Book of Common Prayer" might be for another. The result of those meditations are the pieces of In Rough Country-balanced and illuminating essays that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form. As she engages with forebears and contemporaries, Oates provides clues to her own creative process, for prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood'. What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency.

$18.37

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Publisher: ECCO Press,U.S.
Published: 29 Jun 2010
ISBN 10: 0061963984
ISBN 13: 9780061963988

Media Reviews

Oates writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn't look back...long sentences unfold with great beauty, and [Oates's] line of argument follows not an artificial arc but the natural course of thought. -- New York Times Book Review

Author Bio

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 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, 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. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. 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.