Prolific Oates has soft spot for short story

Talking with her, you would never know Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most diverse, best-known and prolific of all writers.

"It's a representative sampling of my work, but I was urged to do it," Oates said, a little embarrassed by "High and Lonesome," her new thick volume of 36 selected short stories. "It seems sort of posthumous to me, as if I'm dead or that I'm through writing — and I'm not."

Oates has written novels, short stories, plays, poetry, young-adult novels and mysteries using a pseudonym. For a long time she wrote under the name Rosalind Smith, and now she has written three novels as Lauren Kelly.

"I use a pseudonym," she said by phone from her Princeton, N.J., home, "because I sometimes want to write a more structured novel.

"Mystery novels have a different structure, they're more cinematic. When you write a literary novel you want to be as imaginative as possible. But with a suspense novel, you have to be concerned with movement of plot and be able to clear up the mystery at the end. You don't need to do that with literary fiction. I enjoy experimenting with forms."

In Oates' opinion, these choices are similar to a poet writing sonnets.

Asked which genre she prefers, Oates said, "I love the short story. I love to read them and I love to write them. Each one is trying to do something different and with a different voice. In my life, I've probably read 10,000 short stories. I have especially enjoyed James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner."

She believes some of the best writers have had no writing courses. "Hemingway learned a lot by being a journalist — but Cormac McCarthy, Joan Didion and Tobias Wolff are also spare in their writing."

If she reads Dickens, Hemingway or Faulkner, she expects to see landscape. "Cormac McCarthy ('All the Pretty Horses,' 'Blood Meridian') describes more places than he does characters, and I like that. I want to see the landscape. Writing is both foreground and background. I find background even more interesting than foreground."

She finds that many best-sellers, especially thrillers, tend to be "thin" — with no background at all. "I'm a reader who gets something out of most writing. I don't find Updike's characters engaging — but his writing voice and description are wonderful."

Oates used to write mostly in the third person, but now she tends to write in the first person. She has found her voice.