Joyce Carol Oates: 'With prose fiction you can go beneath the surface'

It's revolution on the Fictionable podcast, where we've evolved again to hear more from our fabulous contributors.

We're devoting an entire programme to Joyce Carol Oates and her fantastic story Small Veins, with Fiona Mozley, José Falero and his translator Maria Jacqueline Evans, Donal McLaughlin and Sabba Khan all joining us over the coming weeks.

In this programme, Oates tells us how she paid for Small Veins with her own blood, and how she works out if something is a "Story" or a "Tale of Suspense". She talks typography as she explains how she captures the rhythm of thought on the page, and examines the very Oatesian notion that "the unimaginable improbable will become, within a surprisingly short period of time, the imagined probable".

"In my heart I'm sort of like a fourteen-year-old girl," Oates confesses, and perhaps this focus on the new and the wonderful is the secret of the unquenchable creativity this eighty-five-year-old master of fiction in all its forms still shows in all her work.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.