Sunday, February 03, 2013

Sunday Night Poetry: Joyce Carol Oates


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6 comments:

Todd Mason said...

One reason I enjoy the FictionMags list: It was because of membership that I wrote the essay in Richard Bleiler's SUPERNATURAL FICTION WRITERS about Oates, which got me to read even more of her work and some assessments of that work; and because I was to learn through conversation on that list of the connections of folks whose work I already enjoyed and respected to Oates...Gordon Van Gelder of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had been her student at Princeton, and Barry Malzberg had been her classmate at Syracuse...which is pretty good mark for any uni's writing program for a year, to produce two impressive writers who in their turn could come close to filling a wing of the library (or, quite literally, a good-sized shelf) with only their own books (leaving aside the duplicate editions and volumes including their contributions they didn't edit, nor are full collections of their work). Though I'm still waiting for the Ace Double of ZOMBIE and HEROVIT'S WORLD...

5:08 PM
pattinase (abbott) said...

Although I have read a lot of Oates, have never reads Malzberg

5:38 PM
Todd Mason said...

There is, as you might gather, a whole lot of Malzberg to begin with, ranging through (at least 19 published) short-fiction collaborations with Kathe Koja and, with Bill Pronzini such work as the novels THE RUNNING OF BEASTS and ACTS OF MERCY (in collections of collaborations, you can get their PROBLEMS SOLVED pretty easily, but A KILLING CLIMATE looks pretty expensive when you can find it) through solo work including the "Lone Wolf" novels (as by Mike Barry), surreal, dramatic UNDERLAY and SCREEN and on to CHORALE and THE REMAKING OF SIGMUND FREUD and BEYOND APOLLO...they (Malzberg and Oates) are both pretty damned diverse as well as prolific.

7:56 AM
George said...

I've heard JCO speak a couple of times. She's very bright. I like her early fiction, but I haven't read any of her more recent novels in years. I did read her memoir A WIDOW'S STORY. Todd is right about Barry Malzberg. He's a very underrated writer.

8:11 AM
Anonymous said...

I was going to mention Malzberg's collaborations with Pronzini, but Todd already did. He also did The Lone Wolf men's action series as "Mike Barry" in 1973-74.

Burt Wulff was a nice guy, once. A New York cop, narcotics division. But he’s seen too much destruction done by the poison in America’s veins—heroin. Too much corrupted and made foul, and finally one life too many—and too close—destroyed. Burt Wulff has gone beyond fear, beyond love, even beyond hate. He’s simply beyond giving the slightest damn whether he lives or dies, so long as he can kill the killers—thousands of them, all over America and all over the world.

All are available as ebooks.

Jeff M.

9:52 AM
Todd Mason said...

Actually, I mentioned those, too, Jeff. But I didn't run the blurb. Malzberg wrote those rather quickly, but deftly, and with the forethought that each would have Wulff crazier than the last...he was the first (afaik) of the DESTROYER-type series to make no bones about the "hero" becoming increasing deranged as he went about his business of retribution...this would be a decade or two before anyone started getting a little closer to this sort of thing in BATMAN comics or Mel Gibson films...

12:41 PM

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