In Rough Country Read online

  MARGARET ATWOOD’S TALES

  1. See Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll (Ontario Review Press, 2006).

  2. In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Anchor Books, 2002), Atwood remarks:

  By the time I was born, my father was running a tiny forest-insect research station in northern Quebec. Every spring my parents would take off for the North; every autumn, when the snow set in, they would return to a city—usually to a different apartment each time. At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown.

  3. As Atwood remarked in an interview with Geoff Hancock in 1986:

  I’m an optimist. I like to show that the Third Reich, the Fourth Reich, the Fifth Reich did not last forever.

  In fact, Orwell is much more optimistic than people give him credit for…He has a text at the end of 1984. Most people think the book ends when Winston Smith comes to love Big Brother. But it doesn’t. It ends with a note on Newspeak, which is written in the past tense, in standard English—which means that, at the time of writing the note, Newspeak is a thing of the past. [Waltzing Again]

  4. The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks are due to the editors of the publications in which, in slightly different forms and with varying titles, the essays in this volume originally appeared.

  The New York Review of Books: “The Woman in White: Emily Dickinson and Friends” “‘Cast a Cold Eye’: Jean Stafford” “The Art of Vengeance: Roald Dahl” “‘Large and Startling Figures’: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor” “In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy” “In Rough Country II: Annie Proulx” “Enchanted! Salman Rushdie” “A Photographer’s Lives: Annie Leibovitz” “‘The Great Heap of Days’: James Salter’s Fiction” “Margaret Atwood’s Tales” “In the Emperor’s Dream House: Claire Messud” “The Story of X: Susanna Moore’s In the Cut” “Boxing: History, Art, Culture: Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History.”

  The New Yorker: “After the Apocalypse: Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse.”

  The Times Literary Supplement: “‘As You Are Grooved, So You Are Grieved’: The Art and the Craft of Bernard Malamud’s Fiction.”

  Playboy: “Revisiting Nabokov’s Lolita”

  Vogue: “Nostalgia 1970: Detroit”

  The Humanist: “Why Is Humanism Not the Preeminent Belief of Human-Kind?” Acceptance speech on the occasion of being named 2007 Humanist of the Year.

  Atlantic Monthly: “The Myth of the American Idea”

  Smithsonian Magazine: “Revisiting Lockport, New York”

  “‘Cast a Cold Eye’: Jean Stafford” is the introduction to The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  “Shirley Jackson’s Witchcraft” is the afterword to Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin U.K.)

  “In the Absence of Mentors/Monsters” originally appeared in Narrative and in Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, and in Narrative.

  About the Author

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the 2010 National Book Critics Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestseller Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972)

  New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)

  Contraries (1981)

  The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983)

  On Boxing (1987)

  (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)

  George Bellows: American Artist (1995)

  Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (1999)

  The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (2003)

  Uncensored: Views and (Re)views (2005)

  Credits

  Cover design by Alison Forner

  Cover photograph by Charles Gross

  Copyright

  IN ROUGH COUNTRY. Copyright © 2010 by Ontario Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200858-9

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  * Warhol found Ali “boring but very handsome.”

  * Guardian interview, December 11, 2004, with Aida Edemariam.