“It’s hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as the eighty-five-year-old Joyce Carol Oates, who is surely on any short list of America’s greatest living writers.”
—New York Times Magazine

“Here, in a stream of intimate correspondence with another writer, we witness the workings of Joyce Carol Oates’s vast mind and great heart. We are the recipients of her frank opinions of current events, cultural tides, and writers in moral decline. We are privy to her daily life, her forays into different literary forms, her indignation over class injustice, and her in-the-moment impulse to write stories that contain the conflicted subconscious of our country. I am touched by her fondness for friends, her kindness toward new writers, her doubts about her work, and her criticism of her early writings. And, oh, what an abundance of wit and humor! Oates’s letters are clearly among the best of the epistolatory canon, providing rare insight and surprising revelations that enable us to better understand what underlies her great body of work. For this writer, they are a touchstone of inspiration.”
—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club

“In these warm and empathetic letters to Greg Johnson over four decades, Joyce Carol Oates reveals the evolution of a major literary career. They show her profound dedication to writing and teaching; her humor and pleasure in the texture of daily life; her tender observations of her aging parents; and her prized friendships . . . A captivating and welcoming book.”
—Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers

“Everyone knows that Oates is a powerhouse—a prolific writer of novels, short stories, plays, poetry, essays, and now great letters. These warm, scintillating letters to the young fiction writer who will eventually become her biographer reveal what a modest, compassionate, disciplined person she’s always been—the perfect friend, teacher, and critic who has a great capacity for appreciation. These letters take us backstage to her glittering social life and international travels, her twelve-hour writing sessions and her endless revisions, her protective love of her parents, her quiet domestic life, the death of two wonderful husbands, her omnivorous curiosity, and her wondering humility.”
—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story

“A peek behind the curtain reveals that the wizard is indeed a wizard. Joyce Carol Oates’s personal correspondence is profound, observant, witty, eloquent, prolific, and fun. All the qualities we’ve come to expect from this master are here in an intimate and informal exchange of minds. I loved it.”
—Michael Imperioli, actor, author of The Perfume Burned His Eyes