"Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than fifty novels and short story collections to her name," wrote Ian Thomson in the Spectator. "Yet she writes wonderfully of life's uncertainties and of American reality in the raw." The reviewer might have also added the dozen-plus plays Oates has written, more than a dozen poetry collections, her literary criticism, a clutch of juvenile novels, and the psychological thrillers she pens under the name Rosamond Smith. Over the course of several decades, Oates has produced this large, varied, and impressive body of work; few living writers are as prolific as Oates, whose productivity is the cause of much commentary in the world of letters. Not a year has gone by since the mid-1960s in which she has not published at least one book; occasionally as many as three have been released in a single year...