Joyce Carol Oates

Princeton neuroscientist Charles Gross enjoyed a nice dinner in UpStairs on the Square’s Soiree room with his wife, Joyce Carol Oates . Their meal included pan-seared day boat scallops with creamy fregola-crimini mushroom, marmalade, English peas, and tarragon… . Teak Media’s Jackie Herskovitz will marry Larry “Link’’ Russell this weekend wearing a gown by South End wedding dress designer Daniel Faucher ...

If Joyce Carol Oates's new novel, "Mudwoman," were a computer game, it would be up there with Mortal Kombat and Doom for its grotesque violence, blood, and gore. Which is odd in a novel about a university president and her conflicts with her board. But of course it's about more than that. This particular university president, when she was 3 years old, was tossed into a muddy riverbed and left for dead. By her mother. As "Mudwoman" begins, Meredith (also M.R., also Mudwoman)

Craig Wright's 2002 play "Recent Tragic Events" starts with a blind date in Minneapolis. Airport-bookstore manager Andrew and advertising executive Waverly have been set up by a mutual friend. The thing is, it's Sept. 12, 2001. Waverly has a twin sister, Wendy, who's living in New York and whom she hasn't heard from since the attack on the World Trade Center. Waverly also has a great-aunt named Joyce Carol Oates who stops by Waverly's apartment in the course of the evening to discuss free will.

THEATER MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM This was August Wilson's breakthrough, the drama that established him as a playwright without peer in exploring the deepest currents of the African-American experience. "Ma Rainey" is in very good hands with director Liesl Tommy and her cast, including Yvette Freeman in the title role and Jason Bowen, who is riveting as Levee, a young trumpeter with dreams. Through April 8. Presented by Huntington Theatre Company. At Boston University Theatre. 617-266-0800, www.huntingtontheatre.org NEXT TO NORMAL A powerfully moving musical about a woman riding the seesaw...

THE CORN MAIDEN AND OTHER NIGHTMARES By Joyce Carol Oates Mysterious, 264 pp., $24 At last count, Joyce Carol Oates has written 50-some novels, 30-some story collections, one memoir, and an uncalculated number of novellas, plays, children's books, articles, essays, and reviews. Since winning the National Book Award for her novel "Them" in 1970, Oates has published an average of two books each year - a feat for which she has been perennially punished by the persistent questions, provoked, no doubt, by equal parts envy and literary curiosity: Does Oates' productivity hurt her writing somehow?

‘We need to put this behind us, Krista. This ugliness. Like an earthquake, or a flood, you’re in shock but then, you know, you galvanize . You come alive . The idea of the Gospels is - ‘Good news is possible.’ ’’ The speaker is Lucille Diehl. The “ugliness’’ is that Eddie Diehl, her handsome and charismatic husband, is a suspect in the murder of his lover, Zoe Kruller. And the grim and oblivious humor in Lucille’s exhortation is not lost on Krista, her daughter and one of two protagonists in Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel, “Little...

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982 Edited by Greg JohnsonEcco, 509 pp., illustrated $29.95 As one of America's most prolific writers, whose acclaimed literary contributions include novels, novellas, short stories, essays, reviews, even plays, it's no surprise Joyce Carol Oates also kept journals. It reflects what we know of this remarkable writer as obsessively reflective and creative, so disciplined she confesses a sense of "profound worthlessness" if a day or two passes without writing.

High Lonesome: Selected Stories 1966-2006 By Joyce Carol Oates Ecco, 664 pp., $34.95 Yes, she writes too much. The ozone layer is on its last legs. The Yankees will probably win the AL East again this year. So what else is new? Since the early 1960s, perhaps earlier, a "sweeping flood" (to quote one of her earliest titles) of short stories, novels, poems, plays, reviews, critical essays, and miscellanea has divided critical opinion over whether Joyce Carol Oates, this paragon of literary energy , is indeed a major writer, or only an inveterate...

Joyce Carol Oates is a smart, bold, insightful writer, but her short stories are puzzling at best. This accomplished novelist, incisive critic, and nimble essayist often dons the cape of the Goth to write short fiction. “Sourland,’’ Oates 23d collection of stories, is by turns shadowy, cold, threatening, degrading, and brutal. The macabre narratives, including tales of vicious rape and pedophilia, are replete with graphic horror. In the title novella, “Sourland,” newly widowed Sophie Quinn copes with the first stages of shocking loneliness.

THEATER MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM This was August Wilson's breakthrough, the drama that established him as a playwright without peer in exploring the deepest currents of the African-American experience. "Ma Rainey" is in very good hands with director Liesl Tommy and her cast, including Yvette Freeman in the title role and Jason Bowen, who is riveting as Levee, a young trumpeter with dreams. Through April 8. Presented by Huntington Theatre Company. At Boston University Theatre. 617-266-0800, www.huntingtontheatre.org NEXT TO NORMAL A powerfully moving...

Craig Wright's 2002 play "Recent Tragic Events" starts with a blind date in Minneapolis. Airport-bookstore manager Andrew and advertising executive Waverly have been set up by a mutual friend. The thing is, it's Sept. 12, 2001. Waverly has a twin sister, Wendy, who's living in New York and whom she hasn't heard from since the attack on the World Trade Center. Waverly also has a great-aunt named Joyce Carol Oates who stops by Waverly's apartment in the course of the evening to discuss free will.

THE CORN MAIDEN AND OTHER NIGHTMARES By Joyce Carol Oates Mysterious, 264 pp., $24 At last count, Joyce Carol Oates has written 50-some novels, 30-some story collections, one memoir, and an uncalculated number of novellas, plays, children's books, articles, essays, and reviews. Since winning the National Book Award for her novel "Them" in 1970, Oates has published an average of two books each year - a feat for which she has been perennially punished by the persistent questions, provoked, no doubt, by equal parts envy and literary curiosity: Does Oates' productivity hurt her writing...

Princeton neuroscientist Charles Gross enjoyed a nice dinner in UpStairs on the Square’s Soiree room with his wife, Joyce Carol Oates . Their meal included pan-seared day boat scallops with creamy fregola-crimini mushroom, marmalade, English peas, and tarragon… . Teak Media’s Jackie Herskovitz will marry Larry “Link’’ Russell this weekend wearing a gown by South End wedding dress designer Daniel Faucher ...

Joyce Carol Oates is a smart, bold, insightful writer, but her short stories are puzzling at best. This accomplished novelist, incisive critic, and nimble essayist often dons the cape of the Goth to write short fiction. “Sourland,’’ Oates 23d collection of stories, is by turns shadowy, cold, threatening, degrading, and brutal. The macabre narratives, including tales of vicious rape and pedophilia, are replete with graphic horror. In the title novella, “Sourland,” newly widowed Sophie Quinn copes with the first stages of shocking loneliness.

‘We need to put this behind us, Krista. This ugliness. Like an earthquake, or a flood, you’re in shock but then, you know, you galvanize . You come alive . The idea of the Gospels is - ‘Good news is possible.’ ’’ The speaker is Lucille Diehl. The “ugliness’’ is that Eddie Diehl, her handsome and charismatic husband, is a suspect in the murder of his lover, Zoe Kruller. And the grim and oblivious humor in Lucille’s exhortation is not lost on Krista, her daughter and one of two protagonists in Joyce Carol Oates’ new...

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982 Edited by Greg JohnsonEcco, 509 pp., illustrated $29.95 As one of America's most prolific writers, whose acclaimed literary contributions include novels, novellas, short stories, essays, reviews, even plays, it's no surprise Joyce Carol Oates also kept journals. It reflects what we know of this remarkable writer as obsessively reflective and creative, so disciplined she confesses a sense of "profound worthlessness" if a day or two passes without writing.

If Joyce Carol Oates's new novel, "Mudwoman," were a computer game, it would be up there with Mortal Kombat and Doom for its grotesque violence, blood, and gore. Which is odd in a novel about a university president and her conflicts with her board. But of course it's about more than that. This particular university president, when she was 3 years old, was tossed into a muddy riverbed and left for dead. By her mother. As "Mudwoman" begins, Meredith (also M.R., also Mudwoman)

High Lonesome: Selected Stories 1966-2006 By Joyce Carol Oates Ecco, 664 pp., $34.95 Yes, she writes too much. The ozone layer is on its last legs. The Yankees will probably win the AL East again this year. So what else is new? Since the early 1960s, perhaps earlier, a "sweeping flood" (to quote one of her earliest titles) of short stories, novels, poems, plays, reviews, critical essays, and miscellanea has divided critical opinion over whether Joyce Carol Oates, this paragon of literary energy , is indeed a major writer, or only an inveterate scribbler whose...