Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most distinguished and critically-acclaimed fiction writers in America. She is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her works of fiction include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde and The Accursed. Her latest collection of stories, Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories, was published in September.