In “The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s story for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, a woman visits an old friend whose husband has recently died, only to discover that the nature of her friend’s grief is more chilling than she could have imagined. Oates is joined by her former student Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s, to discuss the connections between writing and teaching, and between writing and time. Revisiting stories by Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, and more, they consider the ghosts that haunt Oates’s story, the ghosts that haunt fiction, and the ghosts we would argue with if given one more chance.
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“The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s short story in the August issue of Harper’s
A complete collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories
Short stories by John Updike
Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Borges and I”
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
John Gardner and William Gass’s debate over literature
Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School”
A Void by Georges Perec
James Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
4:00: Teaching allowed you to “open a door, step into that other world of people”
7:01: “It’s such a pleasure to read with other people”
10:38: On being a “puppet-like dummy”
14:06: “Not everyone is reading autofiction”
23:00: “I find myself going into a surreal world, because the lost person is still real to the deeper self”
25:21: Even in postmodernism, “there’s always that core of the lone beating heart”
31:03: “If I’m writing a novel, it stretches out to the horizon”
41:31: “If people came back from the dead, they would be the same people they were before”
Joyce Carol Oates