In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews »

In a prolific and varied oeuvre that ranges over essays, plays, criticism, and several genres of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates has proved herself one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world.

In twenty-nine provocative essays, Joyce Carol Oates maps the "rough country" that is both the treacherous geographical and psychological terrain of the writers she so cogently analyzes—Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, and Margaret Atwood, among others—and the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith, after forty-eight years of marriage.

"As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace, as it was to me when the effort of writing fiction seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime," 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 results of those meditations are the essays of In Rough Country—balanced and illuminating investigations that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Taken as a whole, this collection is a rich gathering of insights from a mind consecrated to books -- both as a writer, and as a reader. Oates admits that her natural inclination is, "to wish not to publicly criticize any work of art" out of respect for the difficulty of the creative process. When she must say something negative, she clearly doesn't enjoy it. In an overall uncomplimentary review of Susanna Moore's In the Cut, she finds praise-worthy details, such as a "flair for witty, understated irony," and invests a great deal of ink reminding us of Moore's better work.

Oates has no taste for attacking other writers. The terrain is already rough enough.

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

Revisiting Lockport, New York 372

Notes 387