If only she weren't so prolific, the thinking goes, that Nobel would be hers.  And Joyce Carol Oates – with the aid of her pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelley – is nothing if not prolific, having written well over fifty books in her lifetime.  But this is not for lack

The back jackets of much of Thomas Bernhard's English-language translations are burdened by such qualifications as "near genius" or "second only to Kafka and Beckett."  This, of course, is no small praise: there is no shame in being second to Kafka or Beckett; there is no shame in being a "ne