“Mischievously witty, superbly macabre, and exquisitely sensitive . . . an audaciously subversive collection . . . a tour de force by a signal writer of the American conscience.” —Booklist (starred review)

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in this work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is “genius.” Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates’s most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer’s memoirist work in the form of fiction.