One of the first adjectives that springs to mind when talking about Joyce Carol Oates is prolific. High Lonesome, New and Selected Stories, 1966-2006 is therefore, despite its impressive amount of pages for a short story collection, not a complete replication of Oates’ efforts in the medium. Instead it features a selection of short stories from each decade of her career - though excluding any excursions into what might be labelled as gothic or even plain horror fiction - as well as, at the time, previously unpublished work from the then newly arrived 21st century.
An issue any writer committed to appearing so consistently productive is that, inevitably, not every work is a masterpiece. Such a writer does not slave away at a single project for a decade at a time, satisfied to produce in their lifetime a handful of texts ready to be accepted easily into the literary canon. No, for better or worse, Oates clearly loves the act of writing and has no intention to tie herself down to one idea. The short stories in reflect this, ranging in quality despite the fact that the collection is curated and that many stories have already been weeded out. That is not to say that any story in is strictly bad - though I found the story ‘*BD* 11 1 87’ to be particularly unimpressive - but that it was common in my reading experience to go from reading a story that was merely alright into one I considered a masterpiece and then again back into one that was alright.