It's difficult to write about Joyce Carol Oates without noting the prodigiousness of her literary output: novels, plays, short story collections, poetry, young adult and children's fiction, all of it adding up to more than 150 works. She even has a Twitter feed comprising nearly 31,000 tweets. Simply contemplating this flood of words is enough to exhaust any writer or reader.

SOUL AT THE WHITE HEAT, Oates' 14th volume of nonfiction, shows that she hasn't merely been toiling at her writing for more than half a century. This collection reveals that she's a perceptive and sensitive reader of others' work. Her facility for close reading of the fiction and nonfiction of an assortment of writers, living and dead, is both educational and inspiring.

Of the 33 previously published selections that compose the book, all but a handful are reviews or review essays, roughly half of which appeared in the New York Review of Books. Oates divides those critical pieces into sections entitled "Classics" and "Contemporaries." Because of the similarity of structure of many of the essays, this is not the kind of book best read cover to cover (unless one is obligated to do so for review purposes). Instead, most readers will derive more pleasure by dipping into Oates' consideration of one author and then reading or rereading the works she discusses.

"This collection reveals that [Oates is] a perceptive and sensitive reader of others' work. Her facility for close reading of the fiction and nonfiction of an assortment of writers, living and dead, is both educational and inspiring."

In the relatively brief "Classics" section, Oates strikes a nice balance between warhorses like Dickens and George Eliot and popular writers who don’t necessarily qualify as household names. The latter category includes the gothic master H.P. Lovecraft, who, along with Edgar Allan Poe, in Oates' judgment has "had an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction" (of whom Oates has been one, as evidenced in her collection, HAUNTED). Another is the French detective novelist Georges Simenon, creator of the character of Inspector Maigret, and one of the few modern authors who can rival Oates in her prolificacy.

What is most noteworthy about Oates' consideration of her fellow contemporary writers is the generosity of her judgment. Where some writers might have taken the opportunity to settle scores with literary rivals or diminish their work in an effort to elevate one's own, Oates is unfailingly polite and fair-minded in her assessments. Thus, Edna O'Brien's latest novel, THE RED CHAIRS, is "boldly imagined and harrowing," while the stories in Lucia Berlin's posthumous collection, A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN, are "beautiful and stoically rendered." Even when she's dispensing mild criticism, as in her review of Martin Amis' Holocaust novel, THE ZONE OF INTEREST, she acknowledges that "at his most compelling" he is "a satiric vivisectionist with a cool eye and an unwavering scalpel."

Oates doesn't confine her reviews of contemporaries to more well-known writers. There is an informative entry on Derek Raymond, the English author of "idiosyncratic police procedurals," whose stories feature "the formulaic crime/detective novel conjoined with the novel of philosophical quest." Considering the work of Patrick McGrath, "the most celebrated practitioner of contemporary literary-gothic," she praises him for his "masterful and seductive storytelling."

Oates does offer a handful of brief pieces on subjects that include inspiration and her writing room, along with the introduction to her 2008 short story collection, WILD NIGHTS!, in which she paid homage to writers like Emily Dickinson (whose poetry provides this book's title), Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, by imagining their final days in stories that appropriate their respective literary styles. Despite SOUL AT THE WHITE HEAT's subtitle's allusion to the "writing life," those more interested in Oates' perspective on that subject would be better served by turning to her collection, THE FAITH OF A WRITER.

Near the end of the section on contemporary authors, Oates makes a sharp turn to offer a blistering take on boxer Mike Tyson's memoir, UNDISPUTED TRUTH, and the "brilliantly orchestrated ensemble piece" that is director David O. Russell's film, The Fighter. It seems an odd subject for someone of Oates' refined literary sensibilities, but it's a reminder that in 1987 she devoted a full book --- ON BOXING --- to the subject. "Boxing may be cruel and pitiless to its most ardent practitioners," she writes, "but bountiful to its gifted chroniclers." The book concludes with an accomplished example of reportage: Oates' account of a 2011 tour of San Quentin, one that offers stark evidence for the proposition that "you are not quite the person emerging whom you'd believed yourself to be, entering."

In Oates' essay on Margaret Atwood's IN OTHER WORLDS, a "literary memoir tracing the myriad links between science fiction and literature," Oates praises Atwood as an "avid and enthusiastic reader of any and all texts." That's a generous compliment that could be paid equally to the quality of literary criticism that's displayed throughout this rewarding collection.