In The Event That...

The Summer Is Making You Feela Little Slothful

by Carolyn Wyman

Thu., June 28, 7 p.m., free, Borders, 1 S. Broad St., 215-568-7400, www.borders.com

Could somebody tell Joyce Carol Oates to chill? While the rest of us are on the beach or in our backyards doing just that, Oates is out promoting her latest book, her 107th, and one of five new Oates books scheduled to come out within the next year.

That much produced that fast is usually trash. But Oates, who teaches at Princeton, has won considerable critical praise and many prestigious literary prizes, including the National Book Award. She denies that she's some kind of literary genius. "If you calculate how many hours are spent on every page, probably I'm not that prolific, because I spend so much time writing" (up to 12 hours a day), she told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Pamela Miller in 2004 with just the slightest whiff of impatience. (If Carol were not her middle name, Prolific would be, given the number of times other — jealous? — writers use it when writing about her.)

Indeed, Oates has been unfailingly cordial, interesting and even witty in the multiple previous readings I've attended. The latter is especially surprising given the dark subject matter of her novels. Her latest, The Gravedigger's Daughter (Ecco Books, $26.95), is the opposite of a beach read. Loosely based on her grandmother's life, it chronicles the struggles of the daughter of a German-Jewish Hitler refugee cemetery worker to overcome anti-Semitism, the violent loss of her parents and an abusive husband — and that's just in the first half!

Go to listen to her powerful prose, meet a genuine American literary icon and, most of all, to get inspired to get going on your own work. After all, Oates probably wrote the first chapter of her next novel in the time it took you to read this.