Poe, Twain, Dickinson, James et Hemingway : ces cinq génies littéraires ont tous un style réputé inimitable. C'est pourtant dans leur propre style que Joyce Carol Oates s'amuse dans ces nouvelles à réinventer les derniers jours de chacun d'eux. Poe se retrouve ainsi gardien de phare sur une île déserte, tandis qu'Emily Dickinson revient à la vie sous la forme d'un androïde appartenant à un couple de passionné de poésie...

Folles Nuits

Maggie, la directrice du département de musique de l'université de Forest Park (Connecticut), organise chez elle une soirée.L'un des invités de marque, le célèbre compositeur Rolf Christensen, y fait la connaissance d'un jeune étudiant, Brendan Bauer. Après la soirée, le maître invite l'élève chez lui. Et le viole...Peu de temps après, alors que le conseil d'administration de l'université a décidé d'étouffer l'affaire, Christensen est retrouvé assassiné.Bauer est évidemment le suspect numéro 1. Mais Maggie va enquêter pour qu'éclate la vérité.Un suspense psychologique mené avec brio.

Le département de musique

Quentin P_ è un enigma per i suoi genitori, anche se non credono affatto all'accusa di molestie sessuali mossa da un minore nei suoi confronti. Quentin P_ è un enigma per il suo psichiatra, che comunque lo incoraggia, apprezzando le potenzialità positive dei suoi sogni, di cui parla tanto apertamente. Per sua nonna, Quentin P_ è solo un ragazzo dolcissimo, cui è impossibile dire di no. Ma Quentin P_ in verità è l'assassino psicopatico più terrificante del Michigan. Condannato alla libertà vigilata, Quentin è accondiscendente, ma rimane insensibile a tutto: alla famiglia, ai controlli giudiziari, ai medici. Un giorno, per caso, scopre la lobotomia, e d'un tratto le sue ossessioni prendono forma concreta. Una a una, sceglie le sue vittime obbedendo a una volontà di potenza, il bisogno insopprimibile di creare uno « zombie » tutto per sé che, passivo e remissivo, lo supplichi e lo gratifichi. Esagitato da varie sostanze e dalle sue stesse perversioni sessuali, assolve con zelo ogni sanguinoso compito e, nella meccanicità, acquisisce sempre maggiore astuzia e perizia. Zombie è il romanzo della mente psicotica di un killer seriale che, nel delirio impermeabile del suo monologo, riproduce i movimenti automatici di una società disumanizzata. Joyce Carol Oates descrive con rara maestria efferatezze difficili anche solo da immaginare, in una prosa rapida, tagliente, che evoca il male con una manciata di pensieri dissociati - la sintassi nevrotica di una coscienza che rimane mistero. Leggere questo libro è un'esperienza disturbante: facendo rivivere i nostri peggiori incubi, nella sua tensione nerissima ci tiene prigionieri della mente del mostro, fino a quando vorremo implorare pietà.

Zombie

55 Stories to benefit Protect, the political lobby of the National Association to Protect Children, whose victories include the Circle of Trust act and the HERO Corps, which hires wounded veterans to assist law enforcement in hunting online predators. Contributors include Andrew Vachss, Joyce Carol Oates, Harlan Ellison®, David Morrell, Laird Barron, Linda Rodriguez, Charles de Lint, Hilary Davidson, Joe R. Lansdale, Joelle Charbonneau, Reed Farrel Coleman, SJ Rozan, and Alison Arngrim. 600 pages of fiction of all genres, poems and art, essays and memoirs, to fund one cause: to protect children from abuse and exploitation of all kinds.  Table of Contents: When!? by Linda Sarah The Questions by Alison Arngrim City Water by Allison Glasgow Black and White and Red All Over by David Morrell Silvia Reyes by P. J. Ward Plan B by Andrew Vachss Gatekeeper by Richard Prosch The Night Watch by Susan Schorn One Night in Brownsville by Gary Phillips Silverfish by S. J. Rozan Parental Guidance by Scott Adlerberg Superhero, With Crooked Nails by Rachael Acks Angel by Terrence McCauley Mr. Nance by Linda Rodriguez Something I Said by Bracken MacLeod El Puente by Rios de la Luz Mesquite by Graham Wynd Level 5 by C. R. Jahn On the Road to La Grange by Karina Cooper Reprisals: Enmity by John A. Curley The Whistler in the Graveyard by Chad Eagleton (illustration by Dyer Wilk) Solar Highway by S. A. Solomon Jibber Jabber by Reed Farrel Coleman Doll: A Poem by Jyl Anais Ion (illustrations by Jyl Anais Ion) Doggone Justice by Joe R. Lansdale The Occurrence of the Black Mirror by Teel James Glenn Sister Cecilia by Hilary Davidson Croatoan by Harlan Ellison® Little Howl on the Prairie by Thomas Pluck Things Held Dear by Neliza Drew 49 Foot Woman Straps It On by Laird Barron Moon Over the Midwest by Elizabeth Amber Love Sixth Floor by Albert Tucher Adamsville by Clare Toohey Point of View by Will Graham High Meadow Storm by Wayne Dundee Out of Context by Joelle Charbonneau Lone by Alex Segura (illustrations by Dennis Calero) Love and Valour on 'the Victorian Titanic' by Gill Hoffs Just Pretend by Martyn Waites Freak by Charles de Lint The New Heroes of the Old Fairgrounds by K. L. Pereira When the Hammer Comes Down by Josh Stallings Stretching Fifteen by Angel Luis Colón Bounty by Jerry Bloomfield Light-Bringer by Laura K. Curtis Hercules and the Spawn of the Titans by Michael A. Black How to Paint Your Dragon by Andrew D'Apice Don't Fear the Ripper by Holly West Two Views by Tim Daly A Hundred Pearls by Errick Nunnally Snapshots by Christopher Irvin Deceit by Joyce Carol Oates The Perfect Weapon by Zak Mucha An Open Letter to the Children of the Secret by Dionysios Dionou Behavior is Truth by Gwyndyn T. Alexander Pigeons for Protect! by Linda Sarah

Protectors 2: Heroes - Protectors Anthologies, #2

The Mulvaneys of High Point Farm in Mt. Ephraim, New York, are a large and fortunate clan, blessed with good looks, abundant charisma, and boundless promise. But over the twenty-five year span of this ambitious novel, the Mulvaneys will slide, almost imperceptibly at first, from the pinnacle of happiness, transformed by the vagaries of fate into a scattered collection of lost and lonely souls.It is the youngest son, Judd, now an adult, who attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys' former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that occasioned the family's tragic downfall. Each of the Mulvaneys endures some form of exile- physical or spiritual - but in the end they find a way to bridge the chasms that have opened up among them, reuniting in the spirit of love and healing.

Nous étions les Mulvaney

Joyce Carol Oates  Journal 1973-1982  " Écrire est... une drogue, douce, irrésistible, et épuisante, " affirme Joyce Carol Oates dans cet important et fascinant récit d'une partie de sa vie, qu'elle entreprend le 1er janvier 1973. Âgée alors de 34 ans et déjà établie comme une formidable romancière et nouvelliste, JCO a consolidé sa réputation littéraire avec un National Book Award. Dans les années très productives qui suivront, elle continue parallèlement de tenir son journal qui, déposé aujourd'hui aux archives de l'université de Syracuse, contient plus de 4.000 pages dactylographiées à simple interligne. Bien que détestant être qualifiée de prolifique, Oates écrit chaque jour avec une énergie fiévreuse : elle utilise elle-même le mot " obsédée ". 

Addition précieuse à une ouvre remarquable, Le Journal de Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982 est un large fragment d'autobiographie de l'un des auteurs américains les plus populaires et les plus respectés. De ces lignes " écrites au fil de la plume et spontanément" émerge un portrait non expurgé de l'artiste en femme, écrivain, professeur, amie. Oates parle de manière à la fois très franche et très émouvante de son mariage (avec Raymond Smith), de sa vie d'enseignante (à Windsor puis à Princeton), de son manque d'instinct maternel et des heures qu'elle passe au piano - une obsession presque égale à celle de l'écriture. Sa réputation croissante dans le monde littéraire l'amène à des rencontres et des amitiés avec d'autres écrivains connus dont Philip Roth, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Ann Tyler, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion et bien d'autres. Mais, jamais très confortable avec les signes extérieurs de la célébrité, Oates ne cesse de se réfugier dans sa vie intérieure à la poursuite de son ouvre. Une ouvre dont ce Journal - qui égale, voire dépasse, celui de Virginia Woolf - est à coup sûr une pièce majeure : on souhaite ardemment que JCO autorise de son vivant la publication de la suite. 

 

 

Membre de l'Académie américaine des Arts et des Lettres depuis 2008, professeur de littérature anglaise à Princeton. Titulaire de multiples et prestigieuses récompenses littéraires, (elle figure depuis des années sur la courte liste des Nobélisables), Joyce Carol Oates figure depuis longtemps au premier rang des écrivains contemporains.

Journal 1973-1982

A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning "Undocumented Alien"The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance. "Fleuve Bleu" exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates's prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results.  In "Big Burnt, " set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, "Les beaux jours" examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a "master" artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic "Undocumented Alien" depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage. In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior-until the hour when they do not.

Beautiful Days - Stories

Désirs exaucés, suivi de "Démons", et "L'Agresseur"

An ingenious dystopian novel of one young woman''s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society  When a recklessly idealistic girl in a dystopian future society dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled world, she is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America - ''Wainscotia, Wisconsin'' - that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town, she is set upon a course of ''rehabilitation'' - but she falls in love with a fellow exile and starts to question the constraints of her new existence, with results that are both devastating and liberating.  Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is an exquisitely wrought love story, a novel of harrowing discovery - and an oblique but powerful response to our current political climate.

Folles Nuits

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