Joyce Carol Oates is the author of some one hundred books in multiple genres, including the novel Little Bird of Heaven (2009), the story collection Sourland (2010), and the memoir A Widow’s Story (2011), all from Ecco. The 2010 recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement of the National Book Critics Circle, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978. Oates’s “Ballerina” appeared in our fortieth-anniversary retrospective (Spring 1986).