Joyce Carol Oates posed as Emily Dickinson in the 1995 Halloween issue of the New York Times Magazine. No doubt, many an English teacher clipped the image, but, unsurprisingly, the contemporary author better embodies her muse with language. In Wild Nights!, Oates contemplates the immense task and the terrifying limitations of writing at the end of life on behalf of five American greats: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and, of course, Dickinson. Her title appropriately comes from the same Dickinson verse — ""Wild Nights / Wild Nights! / Were I with thee..." — that Oates cited for the Times picture more than a dozen years ago.

This experimental short-story collection is cohesive without being contrived. Oates conjures a different voice for each of her subjects, and each story seems to originate from a different impulse altogether. "Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House" is a fantastical diary chronicling a decent into madness — composed with the abundant ampersands and uneven italics that mark private prose. "EDickinsonRepliLuxe," a tale of a suburban couple that purchases a Dickinson android, is science fiction layered over domestic drama. "Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906" — a story in letters — reveals Twain to have a bit of a confused fetish for young girls. In "The Master at St. Bartholomew's," the dignified James opens himself up to the sensuality of Whitman's poetry in a World War I hospital ward. And the clipped, limited-third-person narration of "Papa at Ketchum" carries Hemingway's anger and perhaps lingering sadness, but never approaches tenderness.

Oates' husband died earlier this year, and it is tempting to speculate on her emotions, just as she interpolates from the minds of her subjects. And yet, Oates has never been an author confined to her own experiences. In her hands, Hemingway's confession that "the purpose of the female is cunt" is as honest as James gently ministering to the war wounded. Wild Nights! is as much about writing as it is about dying, and the single theme that unites the five stories is each writer's peculiar brand of isolation. "Thoroughly alone," says Poe; "So lonely!" exclaims Dickinson; "LONELY! SECRET PEN-PAL WANTED!" Twain advertises; "This loneliness!" thinks James; and Hemingway is "always alone."

-Emily Stone