Download Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life AudioBook Free
A new collection of critical and personal essays on the writing life, from Country wide E book Award-winning and New York Times best-selling writer Joyce Carol Oates. "Why do we write?"With this question Joyce Carol Oates, in this new collection of seminal essays and criticism, begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life and everything its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities. Leading her mission is a desire to comprehend the source of the writer's motivation: Do themes haunt those who might bring them back to life before writer submits? Or does indeed something "happen" to us, an abrupt ignition of any burning fire? Can the appearance of any muse-like Other bring about a writer's best work? In Heart at the White Heating, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and artistically dissects for hints to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many more seem as predecessors and peers - material by which Oates sifts in performing as literary detective, philosopher, and college student. The book reaches its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at the job, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author's writing room. Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates' novels as well as her nonfiction will quickly realize much to be influenced by and obsess upon in this inventive collection from an American grasp. As the New York Times has said of her essays, "Oates's writing has always appeared effortless: urgent, unafraid, torrential. She writes like a girl who strolls into tough country and doesn't look back again."
