Soul at the White Heat

A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates.

"Why do we write?"

With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer’s inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer’s best work?

In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s own writing room. The New York Times Book Review has raved, "who better than Joyce Carol Oates . . . to explicate the craft of writing?" Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master.

In this masterclass on the literary arts, Oates asks the essential questions every writer and reader faces:

• The Writing Life: An unflinching look at the anxieties, joys, and obsessions that fuel the creative mind, drawing from Oates’s own decades of experience.
• Inspiration for Writers: A deep investigation into the elusive source of creativity, questioning whether subjects choose the writer and how the artistic flame is ignited.
• Literary Criticism: Deft dissections of literary masters like Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James, viewed through the lens of a modern peer.
• The Writer's Craft: Rare, candid dispatches from the author’s own writing room, offering personal insights into her celebrated process and philosophy.