Recommended by Professor Ford
Wild Nights by Joyce Carol Oates is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read – a collection of stories about the last days of certain luminaries from the American literary canon (Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway). The stories are all in some way fantastic, dark and harrowing. Poe is shipwrecked on a weird island with a lighthouse on it in which he is spending either his last days or eternity. Emily Dickinson is in robot form here and a servant in a home where she suffers terrible abuse. Perhaps the most surreal of all is the story in which Henry James works in a London hospital treating the war wounded. The descriptions of the horrors that he encounters are cribbed from Walt Whitman’s writings on his work in hospitals in DC during the Civil War. The mood is bizarre, reminiscent of the hospital scene in the film Jacob’s Ladder. James, a writer of delicate, complicated stories meets the blood and guts and physicality of the world Whitman lived in. Mark Twain, it turns out, is a pedophile, and in the last piece about Hemmingway, old Papa, decrepit macho man, rightly gets his ass kicked. You won’t find another collection like this one.