“A poignant, nostalgic collection of literary criticism by one of America’s premier authors.”—Kirkus Reviews
In Rough Country is a sterling collection of essays, reviews, and criticism from Joyce Carol Oates that focuses on a wide array of books and writers—from Poe to Nabokov, from Flannery O’Connor to Phillip Roth. One of our foremost novelists, National Book Award and PEN/Malamud Award winner Oates demonstrates an unparalleled understanding and appreciation of great works of literature with In Rough Country, and offers unique and breathtaking insights into the writer’s art.
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.
Hometown:
Princeton, New Jersey
Date of Birth:
June 16, 1938
Place of Birth:
Lockport, New York
Education:
B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface: In Rough Country xiii
I Classics 1
A Poe Memoir 3
The Woman in White: Emily Dickinson and Friends 13
Cast a Cold Eye: Jean Stafford 29
The Art of Vengeance: Roald Dahl 45
Revisiting Nabokov's Lolita 63
Shirley Jackson's Witchcraft: We Have Always Lived in the Castle 68
"As You Are Grooved, So You Are Grieved": The Art and the Craft of Bernard Malamud 84
"Large and Startling Figures": The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor 94
Boxing: History, Art, Culture 112
II Contemporaries 131
Remembering John Updike 133
Homer & Langley: E. L. Doctorow 135
In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy 144
In Rough Country II: Annie Proulx 180
Enchanted! Salman Rushdie 197
Philip Roth's Tragic Jokes 216
A Photographer's Lives: Annie Leibovitz 226
"The Great Heap of Days": James Salter's Fiction 236
Margaret Atwood's Tales 251
In the Emperor's Dream House: Claire Messud 282
After the Apocalypse: Jim Crace 299
The Story of X: Susanna Moore's In the Cut 310
"It Doesn't Feel Personal": The Poetry of Sharon Olds 320
Too Much Happiness: The Stories of Alice Munro 327
III Nostalgias 343
Nostalgia 1970: City on Fire 345
The Myth of the "American Idea": 2007 351
"Why Is Humanism Not the Preeminent Belief of Humankind?" Address upon Receiving the 2007 Humanist of the Year Award 354
In the Absence of Mentors/Monsters: Notes on Writerly Influences 357
