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Wild Nights!

By Gary Williams, Special to the Rocky

Published May 1, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Fiction. By Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, $24.95. Grade: A

Plot in a nutshell: Oates masterfully imagines the final days of five literary giants in this clever collection of short stories.

The author skillfully mimics the styles of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway as she mixes known facts from their later years with her own, often bizarre, musings.

In the story EDickinson Repliluxe, Emily Dickinson is a robot, with her personality traits downloaded into an eerie resemblance of the reclusive poet. In Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House, Poe slowly loses his sanity, alone as a lighthouse keeper near the coast of Chile, where he was sent as part of an experiment in solitude.

Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906 portrays an increasingly creepy correspondence between Twain and a young female admirer.

Sample of prose: Oates' perceptions are not romanticized versions of these flawed writers. She writes of Twain: "As he was gracious, crinkly-eyed with merriment and unfailingly seductive in public, so he was sour, spiteful, childish and impossible in private."

And of Hemingway, she writes, "His truest life was such secrecy and fantasy. The truest life must always be hidden. As a boy he'd known this. As a man he'd known this amid bouts of drinking, partying, hosting houseguests, playing the Papa- buffoon everybody loved. He'd known this lying gut-sick and insomniac in sweat- stinking bedclothes."

Pros: Oates' ability to replicate the style of the writer she is memorializing is amazing. The Poe and Hemingway stories are especially impressive in mirroring those distinctive voices. And one gets the impression that the prolific Oates does so with ease.

Cons: Not that it diminishes the writing or the substance of the stories, but Oates certainly preys on the damaged parts of these writers' psyches.

Final word: Oates' writing skill is evident on every page. Fans of her previous work, and certainly fans of the authors honored in these stories, will appreciate Wild Nights!