Literary legend Joyce Carol Oates coming to Brooklyn Heights
Brooklyn BookBeat
“It is important for a writer to have a routine — a comfort zone of sorts,” National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in a recent exchange. Oates, who has authored more than 70 books — including novels, short story collections and poetry volumes — will appear in Brooklyn Heights on Oct. 10 to discuss her latest collection of stories, “Lovely, Dark, Deep” (Ecco). The event, hosted by BookCourt at St. Francis College, includes a reading, audience Q&A session and book signing.
“It is helpful to get up early, before the rest of the household is up, to think and write quietly…this is a precious time,” says Oates, who is known for authoring some of the most enduring works of the last half century, including the national bestsellers “We Were the Mulvaneys,” which chronicles a struggling family, and “Blonde,” which reimagines the life of Marilyn Monroe. A recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, among other accolades, Oates 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.
Oates’ latest is a testament to her ability to conjure fresh characters and scenes in each of her books. The stories comprised in “Lovely, Dark, Deep” are distinct yet tied together in their focus on the dark, sometimes veiled aspects of human nature that are eerily beautiful when exposed.
Her story “Mastiff,” which also appeared in The New Yorker, follows a man and woman who share a terrifying, intimate experience when they are attacked by a dog while hiking together. At the beginning of the story, the characters — who have just recently begun dating — are simply called “the woman” and “the man.” “Most of my characters are very specifically named, but those in ‘Mastiff’ begin as ‘the woman’ and ‘the man’ because their relationship to each other is so indeterminate at the start,” Oates explains. “Only after they have shared an intensely emotional experience do they emerge as individuals — ‘Simon’ and ‘Marietta’ — in each other’s eyes.”