Greetings,

I did not know if anyone knew about the book

Wild Nights!
By Joyce Carol Oats

In her book she writes "ingeniously imagine the last documented days (or
nights) of Dickinson and four other writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain,
Henry James and Ernest Hemingway."

the Twain secion is:

In “Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906,” we meet a 70-year-old Mark Twain,
weary of impersonating himself for the benefit of countless “upholstered
ladies.” Fretting lest he never finish — as he does not — his last magnum
opus, Twain consoles himself with the adulation of young schoolgirls, who
remind him of his deceased daughter, Suzy. Inducting them into an
exclusive Aquarium Club, in which he is the sole adult member, and calling
them his angelfish, he gives them little enamel pins and treats like tea
at the Plaza Hotel, tickets to “Swan Lake” and a spate of faintly
libidinous letters. In return, the girls restore to him, or so he fancies,
the ease with which he once wrote. “No one comprehends how a writer, even
an acclaimed and best-selling writer, must work,” he cries. But when
Grandpa Clemens discovers that his latest pet angelfish is really a ripe
16, he refuses to answer her increasingly plaintive letters. Anorexic, the
girl starves herself to look younger, her wrist-bones growing sparrowlike
from malnutrition.


I thought this was interesting as the session for SAMLA is
partly on the Angelfish club.

Jules