She writes more than I believe humanly possible. At the City of Books, Joyce Carol Oates 's works elbow their way through a full twenty feet of shelving. That's ninety-one works in less than forty years, roughly two and a half per year. She has fifteen anthologies to her name, and for nearly a quarter century has co-published the prestigious Ontario Review with her husband. And she hasn't even quit her day job.
Oates is a professor at some college or other.
I used to chalk this extraordinary output up to a few wildly successful Stephen Covey seminars. But then I found out that, in addition to all the above, for the past fifteen years or so Oates has been writing mysteries under a pseudonym. Raymond Chandler himself only published seven novels. So I've changed my mind. The only explanation I now find plausible for the vast dimensions of Joyce Carol Oates's output involves a voodoo priestess and a bag of dead cats.