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The Poisoned Kiss Revealed

March 11, 2010 by Randy Souther


The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese—Joyce Carol Oates’s numinous and unusual short story collection from 1975—has been considered an anomaly among her books, and something of a mystery. The stories had been published individually under the name “Fernandes” with a note that they were translated “from the Portuguese” by Joyce Carol Oates. The collection’s author was listed as “Fernandes / Joyce Carol Oates.”

Adding to the mystery is JCO’s afterword to the book, where she explains:

In November of 1970, while I was occupied as usual with my own writing, I began to dream about and to sense, while awake, some other life, or vision, or personality ….

The Fernandes stories came out of nowhere: not out of an interest in Portugal (which I have never visited), or a desire to write parables to pierce through the density of existential life that I dramatize in my own writing. …

If I did not concentrate deliberately on my own work, or if I allowed myself to daydream or become overly exhausted, my mind would move—it would seem to swerve or leap—into “Portugal.” There seemed to be a great pressure, a series of visions, that demanded a formal, aesthetic form; I was besieged by Fernandes—story after story, some no more than sketches or paragraphs that tended to crowd out my own writing. …

The only way I could accept these stories was to think of them as a literary adventure, or a cerebral/Gothic commentary on my own writing, or as the expression of a part of my personality that had been stifled. …

Since this experience, I have been reading voluminously in parapsychology, mysticism, the occult and related subjects, but so far I have not been able to comprehend, to my own satisfaction, what really happened. … My fairly skeptical and existential attitude toward life was not broad enough to deal with the phenomenon I myself experienced, and yet, at the present time, I find it difficult to accept alternative “explanations.” …

Repeatedly, one is brought back to the paradox that one can experience the world only through the self—through the mind—but one cannot know, really, what the “self” is. …

Fernandes retreated when his story seemed to be complete. A kind of harmony or resolution must have been established, and the manuscript came to an end. Years later, writing this afterword, I am almost tempted to return to my earliest and most conventional diagnosis of the experience and claim it to be only “metaphorical”—the stories, the book they gradually evolved into, the afterword itself. But in truth none of it was metaphorical, any more than you and I are metaphorical.

This fascinating afterword may well explain the origin of the “Fernandes” stories, but it may also leave a wrong impression that the stories were somehow transcribed dreams rather than “written” stories—that they’re somehow less rational, constructed, writerly than JCO’s “regular” stories. JCO even seems to try to dispel this impression in a 1986 Writer’s Digest interview:

I should stress, though, that the voice of these tales was firmly joined to a fairly naturalistic setting by way of subsequent research and conversations with friends who knew Portugal well. And the tales were rigorously written and rewritten.

The afterword addressed the mystical/personality issues that were clearly of primary interest to JCO at the time, leaving out a sense of the more mundane mechanics of research, writing, and revision; and possibly leading the potential literary critic to look elsewhere for less impenetrably personal material to analyze.

However, a few critics have been undaunted. Some have briefly noted the influence of Borges on the one hand, and Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, on the other. James R. Giles takes the first serious look at the book—story by story—and finds a commentary on “the contrast between ‘minimal art’ and ’sanctifying art,’” as well as thematic links to JCO’s other work. Eileen Bender also sees that “Oates/Fernandes offers a parable about the essence of fabulation …. This meta-fiction is an exposure of the deathliness of meta-fiction itself, the ultimate art of annihilation.” And Jacqueline Olson Padgett is concerned about  literary colonialism:  ”Oates’s possessed authorship of a little bit of literature for Portugal forces us to face the danger of such work rendering Portugal’s literature anonymous, of inscribing it only in and by the look of an American other.”

But the most compelling and sustained analysis of The Poisoned Kiss is published this month. Susana Araújo, an appointed researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon, and JCO critic extraordinaire, manages to synthesize and greatly expand upon earlier critical insights, as well as correct some previous misjudgments in her article “Joyce Carol Oates’s transatlantic personae: Fernando Pessoa and Jorge Luis Borges in the USA“ for the March 2010 issue of Atlantic Studies. (contact your library for access to the full article).

The abstract:

This article explores Joyce Carol Oates’s allusions to the work of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa in her collection of stories, The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975). In these stories, Oates maps out an unacknowledged transatlantic genealogy: she re-reads the work of Fernando Pessoa in order to unveil the influence of the Portuguese modernist writer in the works of Jorge Luis Borges  a figure who was, in turn, a major influence for the metafictional writing produced in the US from the 1960s onwards. In order to understand the influence of Borges for the American Fabulators, Oates explores prevailing notions of subjectivity and writing which can be traced back to Pessoa. By travelling back and forwards between Portugal and the US, these stories allow us a better understanding of the US literary landscape during the 1960s and the 1970s in the light of decisive Atlantic lineage.

Araújo manages to set the context of these stories in JCO’s argument with American metafiction of the time, her ambivalent relation to Borges, and her intense engagement in this collection with Pessoa.

What is revealed is a much more intellectually complex and unified work than its haunted reputation would suggest—a lesson that could well be applied to all of JCO’s work.

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Joyce Carol Oates Returns to Lockport

March 10, 2010 by Randy Souther


Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again in Smithsonion.com.

Writers, particularly novelists, are linked to place. It’s impossible to think of Charles Dickens and not to think of Dickens’ London; impossible to think of James Joyce and not to think of Joyce’s Dublin ….

Over the years of what seems to me both a long and a swiftly passing lifetime, “home” has been, for me, several places: Lockport, New York, where I was born and went to school, and nearby Millersport, New York, my home until the age of 18; Detroit, Michigan, where I lived with my young husband Raymond Smith, 1962-68—when he taught English at Wayne State University and I taught English at the University of Detroit; and Princeton, New Jersey, where we lived for 30 years at 9 Honey Brook Drive, while Ray edited the Ontario Review and Ontario Review Press books and I taught at Princeton University, until Ray’s death in February 2008. …

The Lockport Public Library has been an illumination in my life. In that dimension of the soul in which time is collapsed and the past is contemporaneous with the present, it still is. Growing up in a not-very-prosperous rural community lacking a common cultural or aesthetic tradition, in the aftermath of the Great Depression in which people like my family and relatives worked, worked and worked—and had little time for reading more than newspapers—I was mesmerized by books and by what might be called “the life of the mind”: the life that was not manual labor, or housework, but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities. …

An early memory of being with Daddy—in Lockport—and there is a street blocked with traffic and people—one of the narrow streets that run parallel to the canal, on the farther side of downtown—and Daddy has stopped his car to get out and see what is happening—and I have gotten out too, to follow him—except I can’t follow him, there are too many people—I hear shouts—I don’t see what is happening—unless (somehow) I do see—for I have a vague memory of “seeing”—a blurred memory of—is it a man’s body, a corpse, being hauled out of the canal?

Joyce didn’t see. Joyce was nowhere near.
Yes, I’m sure!

Yet years later, I will write of this. I will write of a little girl seeing, or almost seeing, a man’s body hauled from a canal. I will write of the canal set deep in the earth; I will write of the turbulence of falling water, steep rock-sides, the roiling water, unease and distress and yet at the core, childlike wonderment. And I will write—repeatedly, obsessively—of the fact that adults cannot shield their children from such sights, as adults cannot shield their children from the very fact of growing up, and losing them. …

Much more in the full article, including a separate interview.

Posted in Joyce Carol Oates | 2 Comments »

9 Honey Brook Drive

February 23, 2010 by Randy Souther


Those with an interest in literary history as well as having a mattress full of greenbacks should pay close attention to this real estate listing: Joyce Carol Oates’s home of 30 years is for sale.

Wonderful Contemporary Nestled on a Wooded Lot!

This unique home offers one floor living on a beautiful wooded lot. Over 3000 square feet of living space. A stylish and contemporary retreat!

I am no realtor, but I must question the wisdom of leaving out of this listing such significant facts as this home being inspiration for parts of Bellefleur and American Appetites: surely more concrete and salient data than the elusive jargon of “square footage” and “lots.”

Or wouldn’t you rather see a real estate listing such as this:

The houses we love are relatively few in a lifetime, like the people we love; our emotional resources are limited. In each major phase of my life there was a predominant house that I admired, and idealized, from a distance; only in August 1978, house hunting in the Princeton area, did I fall in love with a house at first sight and have the opportunity to buy it—almost immediately …

It isn’t invariably true that wishes fulfilled are apt to be disillusioning. The “enchanted place” in which we live has never ceased to exert its spell on me, every day for over twenty years …

Except for the more private rooms, the walls of most of our rooms are floor-to-ceiling glass, and each room has a sliding-glass door to the outside. We’ve become accustomed to living, in a sense, outside; our former, more conventional houses would seem disorienting to us now …

There is something comforting about being surrounded by green. About watching rain like a waterfall against the domed glass of a skylight, and hearing the rain drumming by night. I am not an ascetic who works by facing a wall, but rather a romantic individual who takes comfort and nourishment from gazing for long minutes out a window, losing herself in the contemplation of trees, sky, birds, the continuous play of light and shadow on the grass. In houses constructed primarily of glass, the eye is always drawn outward, away from the interior (and away from the self); there is a fascinating panorama out there, and in here is less demanding …

Our house was designed by Phillip Sheridan Collins of Princeton, whom my husband and I never met; since then, other architects have been involved in its expansion. Two years ago my study was extended, a second skylight added and more large windows installed. Before that, we added a solarium at the rear of the house, overlooking the pond. Even as I compose this, cement is being laid for the foundation of the extension of our guest wing, itself converted from a garage.

We seem to have become Americans of the sort who continuously improve—reimagine—their property, as if pursuing an elusive dream.

—Joyce Carol Oates, Architectural Digest, Dec. 2000

Now, that’s a listing!

Posted in Joyce Carol Oates | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Joyce Carol Oates on JD Salinger

January 29, 2010 by Randy Souther


Joyce Carol Oates comments on the death of JD Salinger for the Guardian:

“Salinger’s great, obsessive theme was the moral rootlessness of contemporary American materialism and its corrosive effect upon precocious, highly sensitive children and adolescents whose religious yearnings were both esoteric (eastern, mystic) and sentimental (narcissistic, naively self-regarding).”

Now, the world will eagerly await Salinger’s genuinely posthumous work – which is sure to exist, and sure to be an extraordinary legacy.

Also commenting for this article are Annie Proulx, Dave Eggers, EL Doctorow, and Simon Prosser, publishing director of  Hamish Hamilton.

Posted in Books, Joyce Carol Oates | Tagged | 1 Comment »

National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award

January 23, 2010 by Randy Souther


Joyce Carol Oates has won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

JCO was an NBCC fiction finalist in 1992 for her novella Black Water; and a rare double-finalist in 2007 for both fiction (The Gravedigger’s Daughter) and autobiography (The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982).

Previous recipients of the Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award have typically been critics (John Leonard; Leslie Fiedler), editors/publishers (Bill Henderson; James Laughlin; Barney Rosset; Robert Giroux), and organizations (PEN American Center; Library of America), making JCO’s award all the more singular.

Posted in Awards, Joyce Carol Oates | 1 Comment »

Ford and Showalter on JCO’s Marriage

October 6, 2009 by Randy Souther


Richard Ford and Elaine Showalter spoke at the recent celebration of Joyce Carol Oates and Charlie Gross’s wedding. Ford offered the new husband a humorous take on what to expect living with a particular novelist:

… everything Joyce undertakes — including … (yes, Charlie) … including marriage — becomes a literary concoction with a fictive dimension. And therefore the groom — perhaps a dead-beat, perhaps not (all this will be found out as the plot develops) — the groom is hereby put on notice that he can ignore this literary dimension only at his peril. Since everything he’s seeing today, he’ll pretty soon be seeing again, including himself and all his qualities — those good and less good — put on surgical display on some page somewhere. Perhaps even his name will be used, possibly with a different spelling, though possibly not even that). And because he and Joyce chose to elope as they did, and forsook the cautionary formalities of a long courtship, or an engagement, or dating, (or, some local skeptics would say, even forsook the formality of an actual acquaintanceship), the groom has therefore forsaken the chance to think long about his prospective act, as well as the chance to complain about anything, or to be granted a reprieve, or even a hearing. You, Charlie, must realize, now — a little late, you might believe — that he who marries a novelist must expect to see himself in print long before he sees himself in clover. The groom has been blessed with long life, it’s true. But art is much, much longer.

Showalter teasingly notes the differences in their early lives, but leaves unremarked how similarly driven both appeared to be:

He’s a red diaper baby, she’s a blue collar baby. Charlie’s an urban Brooklyn boy; Joyce is a girl from the North Country. While he was maniacally racking up his merit badges to become one of the youngest-ever Eagle Scouts, Joyce was memorizing three hundred Bible verses to win a week at a Methodist Bible Camp near Lake Ontario—one of those proverbial competitions in which 2nd prize must be two weeks at camp. While she was writing her first novels and getting her first story published in Seventeen magazine [sic], he was doing a research project on plant succession and dialectical materialism for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He was organizing a Pete Seeger concert at Harvard while Joyce was still trying to get out of her sorority at Syracuse.

Continue here for the complete, and completely amusing remarks by both Ford and Showalter. And as a bonus, JCO will dance for you.

Posted in Joyce Carol Oates | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson

September 18, 2009 by Randy Souther


Joyce Carol Oates reviews Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the New York Review of Books:

Of the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction—a dazzling lot that includes the tomboys Frankie of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) and Scout of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the murderous eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark of William March’s The Bad Seed (1954), and the slightly older, disaffected Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath’sThe Bell Jar (1963)—none is more memorable than eighteen-year-old “Merricat” of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece of Gothic suspense We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). At once feral child, sulky adolescent, and Cassandra-like seer, Merricat addresses the reader as an intimate:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Con- stance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.Merricat speaks with a seductive and disturbing authority, never drawn to justifying her actions but only to recounting them. One might expect We Have Always Lived in the Castle to be a confession, of a kind—after all, one or another of the Blackwood sisters poisoned their entire family, six years before—but Merricat has nothing to confess, still less to regret. We Have Always Lived in the Castleis a romance with an improbable—magical—happy ending. As readers we are led to smile at Merricat’s childish self-definition, as one who dislikes “washing myself”; it will be many pages before we come to realize the significance of Amanita phalloides and the wish to have been born a werewolf.

In this deftly orchestrated opening, Merricat’s wholly sympathetic creator/ collaborator Shirley Jackson has struck every essential note of her Gothic tale of sexual repression and rhapsodic vengeance; as it unfolds in ways both inevitable and unexpected, We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a “happy ending” is both ironic and literal, the consequence of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice—of others.

See also the NYRB’s podcast with JCO discussing Shirley Jackson. Joyce Carol Oates will edit the Library of America’s forthcoming volume on Shirley Jackson, due out in June, 2010.

Posted in Books, Gothic, Horror, Interviews, Joyce Carol Oates, Novels, Reviews | Tagged | 1 Comment »

Joyce Carol Oates on Ted Kennedy

August 26, 2009 by Randy Souther


As Edward Kennedy is lauded for his tremendous accomplishments as a Senator, Joyce Carol Oates remembers a voiceless victim from his past. From the Guardian:

‘There are no second acts in American lives’– this dour pronouncement of F Scott Fitzgerald has been many times refuted, and at no time more appropriately than in reference to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, whose death was announced yesterday. Indeed, it might be argued that Senator Kennedy’s career as one of the most influential of 20th-century Democratic politicians, an iconic figure as powerful, and as morally enigmatic, as President Bill Clinton, whom in many ways Kennedy resembled, was a consequence of his notorious behaviour at Chappaquiddick bridge in July 1969.

. . .

Kennedy chose to flee the scene , leaving the young woman to die an agonising death not of drowning but of suffocation over a period of hours. Incredibly, it was 10 hours before Kennedy reported the accident, by which time he’d consulted a family lawyer. The senator’s explanation for this unconscionable, despicable, unmanly and inexplicable behaviour was never convincing: he claimed that he’d struck his head and was “confused” and “exhausted” from diving and trying to rescue the young woman and had gone home to bed.

. . .

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

In 1992, JCO published Black Water, a Pulitzer-finalist that reimagined the Chappaquiddick tragedy in the present time, and from the point-of-view of the drowned victim.

Posted in Books, Joyce Carol Oates, Novels | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments »

American Fantastic Tales

July 21, 2009 by Randy Souther


american fantastic talesJoyce Carol Oates makes her first appearance (I believe!) in the monumental Library of America this Fall when the two-volume American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, edited by Peter Straub, is published. Volume one, “from Poe to the Pulps” covers Charles Brockden Brown to Charles Bloch; and volume two, “from the 1940s to now” includes the JCO story “Family,” first published in the December 1989 issue of Omni magazine, and reprinted in JCO’s own collection Heat and Other Stories. as well as the 3rd annual Years’s Best Fantasy & Horror where Ellen Datlow introduced the story this way:

Joyce Carol Oates, when inspired, is immediate in her response to requests for stories. I commissioned a short-short from her for Omni and a couple of weeks later I received it, as well as “Family,” which is certainly science fiction, definitely horrific, and has all the earmarks of an Oates gem. The basic plot is simple: An isolated family adapts to changing times. It’s only when one considers the nature of the changing outside world, and the bizarre nature of the family’s adaptations, that “Family” achieves its full effect.

JCO’s second contribution to the Library of America will be a volume on Shirley Jackson that she is editing.

Full contents:

VOLUME TWO: 1940-2008   744 PAGES.
INTRODUCTION BY PETER STRAUB.
JOHN COLLIER. EVENING PRIMROSE (1940).
FRITZ LEIBER. SMOKE GHOST (1941).
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS. MYSTERIES OF THE JOY RIO (1941).
JANE RICE. THE REFUGEE (1943).
ANTHONY BOUCHER. MR. LUPESCU (1945).
TRUMAN CAPOTE. MIRIAM (1945).
JOHN CHEEVER. TORCH SONG (1947).
JACK SNOW. MIDNIGHT (1947).
JACK FINNEY. I’M SCARED (1948).
SHIRLEY JACKSON. THE DAEMON LOVER (1949).
PAUL BOWLES. THE CIRCULAR VALLEY (1950).
RAY BRADBURY. THE APRIL WITCH (1952).
JEROME BIXBY. IT’S A GOOD LIFE (1953).
TRACE (1964). SPACE BY THE TAIL (1964).
CHARLES BEAUMONT. BLACK COUNTRY (1954).
VLADIMIR NABOKOV. THE VANE SISTERS (1959).
DAVIS GRUBB. WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH (1964).
DONALD WANDREI. NIGHTMARE (1965).
HARLAN ELLISON. I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM (1967).
RICHARD MATHESON. PREY (1969).
T.E.D. KLEIN. EVENTS AT POROTH FARM (1972).
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER. HANKA (1974).
FRED CHAPPELL. LINNEAUS FORGETS (1977).
JOHN CROWLEY. NOVELTY (1983).
JONATHAN CARROLL. MR. FIDDLEHEAD (1989).
JOYCE CAROL OATES. FAMILY (1989).
THOMAS LIGOTTI. THE LAST FEAST OF HARLEQUIN (1990).
PETER STRAUB. A SHORT GUIDE TO THE CITY (1990).
KARL EDWARD WAGNER. CEDAR LANE (1990).
JEFF VANDERMEER. THE GENERAL WHO IS DEAD (1996).
STEPHEN KING. THAT FEELING, YOU CAN ONLY SAY WHAT IT IS IN FRENCH (1998).
KIT REED. THE MOTHERS OF SHARK ISLAND (1998).
CAITLIN R. KIERNAN. THE LONG HALL ON THE TOP FLOOR (1999).
GEORGE SAUNDERS. SEA OAK (2000).
THOMAS TESSIER. NOCTURNE (2000).
MICHAEL CHABON. THE GOD OF DARK LAUGHTER (2001).
JOE HILL. POP ART (2001).
POPPY Z. BRITE. PANSU (2003).
STEVEN MILLHAUSER. DANGEROUS LAUGHTER (2003).
M. RICKERT. THE CHAMBERED FRUIT (2003).
BRIAN EVENSON. THE WAVERING KNIFE (2004).
KELLY LINK. STONE ANIMALS (2004).
TIM POWERS. PAT MOORE (2004).
GENE WOLFE. THE LITTLE STRANGER (2004).
BENJAMIN PERCY. DIAL TONE (2007).

Volume 1

INTRODUCTION BY PETER STRAUB.

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN.  SOMNAMBULISM: A FRAGMENT (1805).

WASHINGTON IRVING.   ADVENTURE OF THE GERMAN STUDENT IRVING (1824).

EDGAR ALLAN POE.  BERENICE (1835).

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN (1835).

HERMAN MELVILLE.  THE TARTARUS OF MAIDS (1855).

FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN.    WHAT WAS IT? (1859).

BRET HARTE.   THE LEGEND OF MONTE DEL DIABLO (1863).

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.    THE MOONSTONE MASS (1868).

W. C. MORROW.    HIS UNCONQUERABLE ENEMY (1889).

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN. THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (1892).

KATE CHOPIN. MA’AME PÉLAGIE (1893).

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS. THURLOW’S CHRISTMAS STORY (1894).

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS. THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS (1895).

RALPH ADAMS CRAM. THE DEAD VALLEY (1895).

MADELEINE YALE WYNNE. THE LITTLE ROOM (1895).

GERTRUDE ATHERTON. THE STRIDING PLACE (1896).

SARAH ORNE JEWETT. IN DARK NEW ENGLAND DAYS (1896).

EMMA FRANCIS DAWSON. AN ITINERANT HOUSE (1897).

STEPHEN CRANE. THE BLACK DOG (1898).

MARY WILKINS FREEMAN. LUELLA MILLER (1902).

FRANK NORRIS. GRETTIR AT THORNHALL-STEAD (1903).

LAFCADIO HEARN. YUKI-ONNA (1904).

F. MARION CRAWFORD. FOR THE BLOOD IS THE LIFE (1905).

AMBROSE BIERCE. THE MOONLIT ROAD (1907).

EDWARD LUCAS WHITE. LUKUNDOO (1907).

OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR. THE SHELL OF SENSE (1908).

HENRY JAMES. THE JOLLY CORNER (1908).

ALICE BROWN. GOLDEN BABY (1910).

EDITH WHARTON. AFTERWARD (1910).

JILLA CATHER. CONSEQUENCES (1915).

ELLEN GLASGOW. THE SHADOWY THIRD (1916).

JULIAN HAWTHORNE. THE ISLAND OF GHOSTS (1919).

FRANCIS STEVENS [GERTRUDE BARROWS BENNETT]. UNSEEN, UNFEARED (1919).

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (1922).

SEABURY QUINN. THE CURSE OF EVERARD MAUNDY (1927).

STEPHEN VINCENT BENET. THE KING OF THE CATS (1929).

DAVID H. KELLER. THE JELLY-FISH (1929).

CONRAD AIKEN. MR. ARCULARIS (1931).

ROBERT E. HOWARD. THE BLACK STONE (1931).

HENRY S. WHITEHEAD. PASSING OF A GOD (1931).

AUGUST DERLETH. THE PANELLED ROOM (1933).

H.P. LOVECRAFT. THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP (1933).

CLARK ASHTON SMITH. GENIUS LOCI (1933).

ROBERT BLOCH. THE CLOAK (1939).

Volume 2

INTRODUCTION BY PETER STRAUB.

JOHN COLLIER. EVENING PRIMROSE (1940).

FRITZ LEIBER. SMOKE GHOST (1941).

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS. MYSTERIES OF THE JOY RIO (1941).

JANE RICE. THE REFUGEE (1943).

ANTHONY BOUCHER. MR. LUPESCU (1945).

TRUMAN CAPOTE. MIRIAM (1945).

JOHN CHEEVER. TORCH SONG (1947).

JACK SNOW. MIDNIGHT (1947).

JACK FINNEY. I’M SCARED (1948).

SHIRLEY JACKSON. THE DAEMON LOVER (1949).

PAUL BOWLES. THE CIRCULAR VALLEY (1950).

RAY BRADBURY. THE APRIL WITCH (1952).

JEROME BIXBY. IT’S A GOOD LIFE (1953).

TRACE (1964). SPACE BY THE TAIL (1964).

CHARLES BEAUMONT. BLACK COUNTRY (1954).

VLADIMIR NABOKOV. THE VANE SISTERS (1959).

DAVIS GRUBB. WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH (1964).

DONALD WANDREI. NIGHTMARE (1965).

HARLAN ELLISON. I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM (1967).

RICHARD MATHESON. PREY (1969).

T.E.D. KLEIN. EVENTS AT POROTH FARM (1972).

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER. HANKA (1974).

FRED CHAPPELL. LINNEAUS FORGETS (1977).

JOHN CROWLEY. NOVELTY (1983).

JONATHAN CARROLL. MR. FIDDLEHEAD (1989).

JOYCE CAROL OATES. FAMILY (1989).

THOMAS LIGOTTI. THE LAST FEAST OF HARLEQUIN (1990).

PETER STRAUB. A SHORT GUIDE TO THE CITY (1990).

KARL EDWARD WAGNER. CEDAR LANE (1990).

JEFF VANDERMEER. THE GENERAL WHO IS DEAD (1996).

STEPHEN KING. THAT FEELING, YOU CAN ONLY SAY WHAT IT IS IN FRENCH (1998).

KIT REED. THE MOTHERS OF SHARK ISLAND (1998).

CAITLIN R. KIERNAN. THE LONG HALL ON THE TOP FLOOR (1999).

GEORGE SAUNDERS. SEA OAK (2000).

THOMAS TESSIER. NOCTURNE (2000).

MICHAEL CHABON. THE GOD OF DARK LAUGHTER (2001).

JOE HILL. POP ART (2001).

POPPY Z. BRITE. PANSU (2003).

STEVEN MILLHAUSER. DANGEROUS LAUGHTER (2003).

M. RICKERT. THE CHAMBERED FRUIT (2003).

BRIAN EVENSON. THE WAVERING KNIFE (2004).

KELLY LINK. STONE ANIMALS (2004).

TIM POWERS. PAT MOORE (2004).

GENE WOLFE. THE LITTLE STRANGER (2004).

BENJAMIN PERCY. DIAL TONE (2007).

Posted in Books, Gothic, Horror, Joyce Carol Oates, Short Stories | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Joyce Carol Oates in Paris

July 10, 2009 by Randy Souther


Guest post by Tanya Tromble

Joyce Carol Oates made an appearance in Paris on Saturday, July 4, for an interview and book signing session at the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées.  The appearance was to promote the release of the French translation of her Journal.  She responded to questions from an interviewer and then from the audience for about an hour and then signed books.  This is the first time I had met her in person, and she was just as gracious and natural as I had imagined her.

She spoke about the difference between fiction writing and journal writing and encouraged everyone in the audience to begin keeping a journal if they were not already doing so.  She said that though there are a few things in the journal she wishes she hadn’t written, overall she feels that looking back at it allowed her to realize the past difficulties she had confronted and gotten through.  Responding to the seemingly mandatory question about violence in her work, she pointed out that an artist is not his/her subject matter, rather the subject is just the material used by the artist.  She thinks that criticism of violence in her work stems from a miscomprehension of what an artist is and stressed that an artist lives in his/her imagination, whereas her own life is a peaceful one.  She quoted Flaubert who said “live like the bourgeoisie so you can be violent in your writing.”

When asked about the relationship between her work and detective fiction, she responded “I don’t write thrillers, exactly” and went on to list many different genres and subgenres of detective fiction.  “I’ve never written a thriller and I’m not drawn to the genre,” she said before going on to explain what she views as the action structure of the thriller.  “The genre I like is psychological mystery/suspense which I think is very true to life.”  For her, this genre is written from the point of view of one person, sometimes a detective, and represents the position we are often in when confronted with something mysterious.  She spoke about family secrets at the periphery of her experience when growing up and expressed the idea that a writer is always pursuing mysterious threads toward illumination and knowledge.  She distinguished between genre fiction and literary fiction saying that in genre fiction the mystery is always explained because of the contract between reader and writer, whereas literary fiction operates in a different dimension where each literary work is supposed to be unique, so things don’t need to necessarily be explained/resolved.  Oates offered Black Girl, White Girl as an example of one of her works with the form of a mystery/suspense novel. Told from the perspective of the white girl, you know immediately that the black girl is dead. The novel looks back over fifteen years, dealing with white guilt, class-generated guilt, and the (sometimes wrongly) perceived cliché qualities in the Other.

Before concluding, she went on to answer questions about The Gravedigger’s Daughter, her play I Stand Before You Naked, her writing process and her favorite French authors including Flaubert (especially Madame Bovary), Camus, Sartre, Duras and Colette.  She apologized for not being familiar with the work of contemporary French authors, explaining that as far as she knew, there were few, if any, English translations available, publishers being wary of venturing into this domain.

It was a surprise and a joy to have Oates finally visit France!

Posted in Books, Joyce Carol Oates, Writing | 4 Comments »

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