“Why do we write?” With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life in this new collection of seminal essays and criticism. 

In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s writing room.