I personally think Joyce Carol Oates must be a robot, because she is just too prolific to be human. Or, possibly, she has an infinite time-expander, or does not sleep. (I know she does crit, novels, plays, and a bit of SF. Possibly she also runs marathons, negotiates for the United Nations, and writes lyrics for the Backstreet Boys.)

"When I do sleep, I sleep in a chair!"

I will say, I would not have known that Robin Hobb and Nora Roberts were the same person, having read a little bit of each. But it's also true that I didn't like Robin Hobb for the same reasons I didn't like Nora Roberts. So the little bit, in each case, was one chapter.

I personally think Joyce Carol Oates must be a robot, because she is just too prolific to be human. Or, possibly, she has an infinite time-expander, or does not sleep. (I know she does crit, novels, plays, and a bit of SF. Possibly she also runs marathons, negotiates for the United Nations, and writes lyrics for the Backstreet Boys.)

Doesn't she also teach? I seem to remember her being thanked in an acknowledgement page of another author, mentioning that she was a professor at his school.

I will say, I would not have known that Robin Hobb and Nora Roberts were the same person, having read a little bit of each.

Nora Roberts writes mysteries as J.D. Robb. I think Robin Hobb is someone else.

There were several novelists in the '40s and '50s like Robert Nathan and Paul Gallico who moved from a sort of magical realism to fantasy to regular fiction without being pegged into a genre. You also have people like Kurt Vonnegut, who contends he's not a science fiction writer despite the sf content of his novels, and Ray Bradbury, who largely identifies himself as an sf author when many of his stories would have fared fine in the mainstream.

Harlan Ellison has probably written everything. As he'd be the first to point out. Mystery, SF, nonfiction, essays, and I don't know how you'd classify the book about NYC gangs. And lots of TV.

He might be a particularly good example since he's complained about genre... typecasting? Or whatever that's called.

I may be influenced by the fact that I read Jude the Obscure and The Return of the Native in one day for a test.

That would kill a lesser person.

I think I've posted before about my detestation for Tess, both the book and the character. Actually, my Victorian Lit class had me disliking almost all the fiction writers assigned (except for Lewis Carroll), but liking most of the essayists.

Nora Roberts got a nice blurb from Stephen King in his latest EW column, as the best romance writer around (he said something like "She's written 700 books, of which I'm guessing around 100-200 are any good, but those that I've read, I've liked a lot.")

If anyone hasn't read Ellison's The Glass Teat yet, I highly recommend it--it's an excellent collection of columns he did on TV in the late '60s/early '70s.

Doesn't she also teach? I seem to remember her being thanked in an acknowledgement page of another author, mentioning that she was a professor at his school.

Yeah, she's a professor at Princeton, or was last I knew.

I think Robin Hobb is someone else.

She is, she used the name Megan Lindholm in the past too.

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I read all the Hardy there was by choice and was SAD when I ran out.

You weirdos.