Some people love to write. Others simply can’t not. Isaac Asimov, for example, was a single-purpose machine: It wrote. Asimov published more than 500 books – in all genres, on all subjects, in the process checking the boxes for nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification.
Then there is Joyce Carol Oates, the wildly prolific novelist, short-story master and nonfiction author who has been filling shelves at bookstores, collecting literary trophies by the armload and leaving her name all over “Best of” lists and anthologies since her first novel appeared in 1963. The Lockport, New York native settled in at Princeton in 1978 and has been anchoring its Creative Writing program ever since, showing no signs of slowing in the second decade of the new millennium. Oates’ two most recent novels are A Book of American Martyrs (2017) and Soul at the White Heat (2016).
The Golden Notebook in Woodstock presents a reading by the dynamo of American arts and letters Joyce Carol Oates on Saturday, July 29 at 6 p.m. at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, located at 28 Tinker Street in Woodstock. For more information, visit www.goldennotebook.com.