Joyce Carol Oates: 2013 National Book Festival

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC my name is Maureen Corrigan I'm a book critic for the Washington Post and for fresh air thank you The Washington Post has been a sponsor of the festival since it began thirteen years ago so it's been a long time today I thank you today I have the really great pleasure of introducing to you Joyce Carol Oates and I get to say something that I have never before said in all the years that I've been coming to the National Book Festival Joyce Carol Oates is the author of at least 70 books that's 70 that number includes novels novellas plays collections of essays and criticism and also collections of poetry and short stories of course Joyce Carol Oates is not only a prolific writer she's also a superb one if I started to list all the awards that she gave we'd be here until 7 o'clock at night so I'll just pluck out the O'Henry award the National Book Award and the National Humanities Award that is a very select list I also want to tell you that she's garnered great word-of-mouth praise if you talk to independent booksellers as I do and to undergraduates in college they all say when they hear the name Joyce Carol Oates that she is a delight that she is down-to-earth that she is kind and that she's generous with her time I know of at least two undergraduates who wrote to her out of the blue asking for writing advice and she very kindly wrote them long letters back that's unusual let me tell you she Joyce Carol Oates seems to delight in mixing things up in mixing genres and types of stories she's said that each book that she writes is a world unto itself and must stand alone in a in a review in the New York Times of her latest novel the accursed Stephen King anointed that novel the world's first postmodern gothic novel he also went on to likin the accursed - a cross between El Doctorow's ragtime and Dracula by Bram Stoker if that doesn't wet your appetite nothing will in addition to the accursed Joyce Carol Oates also has recently published a collection of four novellas about love gone wrong called evil eye please welcome me please welcome please join me in welcoming Joyce Carol Oates thank you very much for the lovely introduction very lively and spirited I'm always very happy to be here in Washington DC it's sort of like the center of all sorts of things very exciting things some of which one can actually speak about my friends back home will be very impressed that I'm here and nothing you know horrendous happen if I actually do get back so I'm here to talk about my new novel I think and my new book of stories and I was here a couple of years ago it was interviewed so wonderfully right on stage and then we had questions from the audience that were just brilliant so I'm wondering if there any of these brilliant people are here this afternoon and but you know it could just sort of go immediately to these wonderful questions but I'll start by talking a little bit about myself I began writing a long long time ago before anyone here was born I guess it was sort of a time when you you inscribed that you engraved on pieces of stone you know with a sharp then my first quantum leap to another way of communication was when I was given a box of Crayolas and this was like the great step you know like told story was given a typewriter or something so I was given these Crayolas I could not yet read and I suppose I heard in some way in some sort of gibberish I'm not sure that it was coherent but I wasn't yet a literate person I was very I was a very small person at that point so I was so excited about the idea I think the Crayolas maybe something about the hand-eye coordination and the idea of commemorating and imitating the the visual world you know children are drawing and they're sort of appropriating the world that I started very extensively writing novels on tablets I've seen these they're quite bizarre they should be in that strange Museum in Philadelphia I think Muto Museum where all these pathological things are like these tablets many many tablets of scribbles because I didn't know how to write yet so they were like different colors and they were very they were very passionate all the adjectives that are approaching by reviewers who are being kind you know passionate vivid and and so so for all those altitudes would accrue to these scribbles as well I thought that was funny this actually seemed very pathetic and sort of funny then after a while I'm not saying how many years this was I learned to draw so I could only draw two figures one was cats and the other was chickens and you could actually not tell the difference between them - well I thought maybe in some anthropomorphic way I was writing about people so the cats are upright and the chickens I guess are off right anyway so they kind of cats and chickens and then this continued for a long time and we're really talking about a whole evolution like of a toll story here you know before he was even even literate so I guess the point that I'm making and I'm sure everyone in the audience has experienced the same thing is that we are all so mysteriously creative and that it's the impact of the visual world and maybe the mysterious world of adults that we wanted to somehow put into into a book and into our imagination so somewhere along the line then I must have learned to actually read and then I learned to write and so I just sort of continued with that fervor and I've always thought it was really interesting and mysterious that the roots of our creativity are so deep in us that they lie wait before we have anything to say nothing to say you know I wasn't a feminist then and people who are commercial writers are going to become billionaires but it really begins at a time and when they don't have any agenda and one doesn't think of oneself as a writer in any way so it's isn't it's really amazing and very mysterious I think these these roots and the the deepest roots of our human unconsciousness and what is shared in us that's very hard to talk about then I went to a one-room schoolhouse this is an upstate New York we were we lived in a small farm and it was not a very successful farm I have still a sort of romantic predilection for the for the outdoors and for farmland and I would love somebody to have chickens again but I can't think that really that way of life is easy it is easy hello are you hearing that or is that just in my head I I hear a voice that's telling me to do things well anyway so I went to a one-room schoolhouse that my mother had gone to and I learned to read and I remember we had on we had a small library that was really just a like a windowsill and we had books on the windowsill in our in my family home in the farm farmhouse we didn't have any books at all I think maybe just one book it was the book the short stories of Edgar Edgar Allan Poe so when I was at school I really was introduced to the world of books and I think because books were so rare in my life that they assumed a high value now if you contrast with today with a young person today it's so radically different it's hardly any comparison as I came from this world where my parents did listen to the radio but there was no television and of course there's nothing like the electronic ways of communication that we have today so I was through they are very much have had my own imagination and with the Crayolas and the coloring books and drawings and telling stories I really was creating little worlds of my own later on when I went to college I would read about the Bronte sisters the Bronte's and there are the sisters and their brother and you know that they grew up and extremely imaginative and emotional and economically deprived childhood in the Moors of northern England and because I had know very little else they had to rely upon their own storytelling and they made up these little books in a small italic language which wasn't can read I think with a magnifying glass and out of that as years went by out of that really grew the now the great novels weathering Heights and all and I've told this I'm sorry I'm so distracted by that sound there and Jane Jane Eyre so maybe I'll just sort of open it up to to some questions in a few minutes the novel that I would that I most have most recently published he's called the accursed and it's the last in a series of post modernist gothic novels I began with bellefleur which is a family novel and as a kind of epic tragedy of American life and Bellefleur was published in 1980 1980s then the second in the series is a blood summer romance and this novel draws upon women's writing romances of the 19th century and I'm looking upon American inventions you know small-town inventors in America and looking upon the the rise of women women's suffrage and the male-female relations as sort of look like a feminist look back in the 19th century is called a blood summer romance and then mysteries a winter term was my face in the series it's a collection of three mysteries the first mystery takes place when the young detective is only a teenager and then he's in his twenties and then finally he's in his late 30s it's a way of looking at American jurisprudence criminal justice and unsolved American mysteries I chose three sort of iconic American mysteries one of them was a Lizzie Borden case which was adjudicated but many in many respects it was never really solved and the other was a case that a murder case it took place in New Brunswick called it's known as the minister and the choir singer and it was thought that probably the Ku Klux Klan had something to do with these murders and the final mystery that I wrote about it is based upon the legal Frank assassination or lynching and again at draws upon the early history of the Ku Klux Klan so I'd look upon the novels as means of investigating American history especially areas of history that haven't been completely solved where there's some area of mystery I've also written about a couple of other mysteries I just occurred to me that I had all been fascinated by the JonBenet Ramsey case which for a long time Stephen it seems not to be solved some people think it's been solved and some people are sure that it hasn't been so I wrote about that in a novel later come my sister my love and I think that for all of us who are writers are interested in American history that to look upon something that's never been solved and remains controversial well you can do some research and find different points of view I think it's a very exciting and legitimate area for investigation and then you can use your imagination to suggest a kind of solution then my most recent novels called the accursed I finished this in early draft that was actually complete in 1984 and so it was only published in 2013 which is really a long time later when I finished it in 1984 I was living in Princeton and when I moved to Princeton I became very fascinated by the history of that area it's a very historically rich area in the in Princeton New Jersey and Trenton and that part of Pennsylvania and that sort of power of the United States the history is is very particularly interesting for those who have a have a particular concern with women's rights with male male female relations or female male relations and with with racial the evolution of race relations in the United States and again the Ku Klux Klan has a role in the novel the rise of the Klan in the in the early years of the 20th century particularly in South Jersey so not novel actually begins with in the after me I think it's like a day after a lynching has taken place some miles maybe only about 50 miles away from Princeton New Jersey and the concern of the people in Princeton is not to talk about it that they go to great lengths to to sort of pretend that they don't know about it and they haven't heard about it and they particularly don't want to talk about it so when I finished writing this in 1984 I usually put a manuscript away for some months sometimes a year and then I take it out again and reread it and editor and often I rewrite it so when I was done with it I wasn't really satisfied with the voice and I put it away but unfortunately years went by and I would go in the room and look at the manuscript which if you know New Jersey it's a very humid state so the manuscript is getting more and more molding and kind of I felt really like going through a swamp and there is actually sort of swamp in the novel so yours went thigh and I would start a few pages and try to fix up the voice and then I'd give up again if you're anyone in the audience as a writer you know there's sort of a wave of something like paralysis that comes over you when you don't you don't have the voice and you don't have the emotion it's like you've been trying to flick a match to light a match but it just doesn't work so years went by and then finally in 2011 and this is after the election of course of President Obama because the novel is about race relations and it is about the rise of the Klan and dealing with the Klan and trying to not notice that the Klan is there and the novel is also about sort of the rise of labor unions and the rise of women's rights so it's it's about a time in our history of nineteen oh five or six when a lot of things were going on and so like a hundred years later it was really time to look back upon that and I felt in 2011 that I could that I could rewrite the novel which I did I'd also read a wonderful book it's partly theological and historical book but also a memoir by James cone Co any he's a black liberation theology theologist he teaches at Union Theological Seminary and he wasn't wonderful book it's called the cross and the lynching tree and I heard James cone talk about in his book and his personal experience he is a minister and it sort of gave me just the key to rewriting my novel which had just been in this manuscript state for like 15 years or so to look upon it as a way of examining the white guilt and the white the white consciousness that in some characters in a novel finally comes to fruition that there are heroic characters in the novel also at this book festival I think was yesterday Scott Berg was talking about Woodrow Wilson he has a new biography of Woodrow Wilson in my novel Woodrow Wilson is a principal character he is the president of Princeton University at the time and I had read a lot of biographies of Wilson and took notes on his his letters he has many many collected letters and I think that my portrait of Woodrow Wilson is probably a little more acerbic than Scott verbs but I was happy to see that Scott Berg saw in Wilson the same sort of the white race a sort of a Virginian gentleman racism that Woodrow Wilson promulgated and also his disinterest or his lack of interest or his his derision in regard to women's rights that another character in my novel is actually Teddy Roosevelt and this is a portrait of a person who isn't who was a president he's president at the time and these portraits of the of them of the presidents are not really exaggerated it seems when you people have said reading the novel you know have you exaggerated or to satirize these people but not really there really there was quite quite strong characters Jack London is in my novel also and he too is extremely strong and vivid character and people think that maybe that's a satirical portrait but it isn't he was really that way and Upton Sinclair the socialist who wrote the jungle is another character in the novel Upton Sinclair had rented a house just close by where where I live today even now I Drive along Rosedale Road past the old Sinclair Upton Sinclair house and another portrait just a cameo portrait of a person who drops by in a novel is share-alike Holmes he's the model the man who was the model for share-alike Holmes not the actual Sherlock Holmes who's a fictitious character but this person who is a real model so finally I did finish that novel I changed the title from the cross works horror was the original title and has changed to the accursed those of you who are familiar with the LP Lovecraft know that Lovecraft has some work called the Dunwich horror and my novel was kind of an allusion to HP Lovecraft so I'm wondering if people would like to ask questions I'd be happy to try to answer any that that you might have yes yes sir as an American writer do you ever have any concern that modern literature and all the classics will eventually have to be re-written so that in order to be understood every fifth word will have to be the word like is that a question is that a question about declining literacy or well I think there's a difference between oral speech and written speech and probably our ancestors had ways of speaking that we're not so so articulate you know when people are speaking there are little words that you say and all languages have them I mean Chinese let's say has some little word Korean has some little word we might say you know and our contemporary younger people may might say like I noticed my students will say like you know like 15 times in in a sentence I think it's a kind of modesty a sort of linguistic modesty the word well you say well comma well how are you the word well is just an empty sound but it's some sort of linguistic meta linguistic way of connecting with people so when people say like when young people say like repeatedly there they're communicating in a meta linguistic way with one another so a person who doesn't say any of these things who doesn't ever say you know or well or like almost seems like a robot doesn't have the idiomatic ease of of ordinary speech but there's a big difference between speech as we as we speak uh in speech as we might write it is written language can be enormous ly complicated but very very complicated long sentences and interesting punctuation and a kind of experimental style that James Joyce has for instance a William Faulkner just really very very fluid but but nobody speaks that way it would seem to be almost psychopathological state if if you spoke that way it's good question thank you oh yes yes it's a pleasure to meet you I've been reading you for about twenty-five years since I've been in high school and one of the very first stories I read was where are you going where have you been and it was my sort of introduction to a new type of feminine voice but I would love for you to comment on why this subject of female maturation is so important to you and your particular take on the story of a woman coming out and having her first sexual experiences or experiences with men and where does that come from within you that drives you to write such amazing stories that I think many women when they're 1516 sort of latch on to well thank you it's a kind of complex question that you've asked with lots of sub sub questions well I think as a as a woman writer a writer who happens to be a woman that I'm just interested so much in the period of adolescence and I've written about adolescent boys to there's something about adolescence that is fascinating because when we use the adjective adolescent in a pejorative way off and you say you're behaving an adolescent fashion but actually adolescence is a very positive time because an adolescents are asserting themselves as individuals these of your family or parents and they're often very skeptical and questioning my students had princie our older adolescents you might say and they are very funny now one of the qualities of teenagers is that they are funny of course you don't think they're funny because there may be laughing at you but are you no laughing at adults but they have this kind of world of discerning truth and sort of looking through hypocrisy that I think is very positive so that's one of the reasons I write about people at that age and also it's a time of sexual crisis and anxiety and not knowing who one is and so forth then that particular story has has a particular genesis where are you going where have you been I had been looking at I was looking literally looking through a life magazine a long time ago when I was in Detroit Michigan and I couldn't remember exactly where I was I was in a teacher's lounge at the University of Detroit and I was sort of looking through this man because I wasn't really reading it as turning the pages and it was an article on there called the Pied Piper of Tucson which was about a man in about 31 or 32 who disguised himself as a teenager he tried to pass himself off as much younger in the teenage culture and he was seducing and murdering girls in the Tucson area with the connivance of other teenagers and burying their bodies out in the desert and when this came to light when it was revealed what was going on what was shocking was that the young people had a kind of allegiance to him they didn't tell their parents they were involved it's sort of a pre Charles Manson situation this is so long ago that the term serial killer didn't exist now you know every third person you meet as it is it's a Supergirl killer I mean maybe I should say on television every third person but but the term serial killer has now become just so popular that's almost too familiar thought but I said when I began writing about this there was no term like that so I thought I'd read a story about a girl who is caught up in this chaos which is sort of moral confusion like do you have a moral commitment to your family to your parents or do you have a moral commitment to your peers to people your own age and I called the story death in the Maidan and it was definitely a hawthorn Ian morality tale and ella gory that nathaniel hawthorne certainly had influenced but unlike Hawthorne's writing I wanted my writing to be very much in the vernacular and very ordinary daily daily life nothing that was abstract or obviously allegorical and some of you may know there are German woodcuts or medieval woodcuts of death in the Maidan where there's a beautiful young girl looking in the mirror she's got long hair and she's very innocent naive and in the background death is standing it's death with his Sethe and he's standing there and he has a skull and he's in the mirror but she only sees her own face she we see him in the mirror but she doesn't see him so I called the story death in the maiden and then after a while I thought it would change it and make it less obviously an allegorical story so I called it where are you going where have you been so that's always a long answer to a great story thank you thank you thank you yeah it's very nice to meet you so often our lives and art are inextricably tied and I wonder miss oh it's have you had any revelations lately any revelation - about like revelation about lying well I think if one is on Twitter one head does it all the time you know there it is like every little tweet is a revelation yeah I think that I've had a lot of revelations about life I think that may be speaking for some people in the audience that the older you get the more mysterious life is and the more you're surprised by more things but then you're not you're not surprised that you're surprised if that makes sense but I think when you're when you're younger you don't have quite the capacity to guess what's coming so that maybe almost a complacence or a confidence when I was a young writer really new young writer with like one book just coming out I somehow had more strange confidence than I do later now when I write I think oh this has to be so original I can't like maybe I did this before or I want to do something I've never done before I want to have sentences that I've never written before and I want a point of view I've never had before but when you're only 21 you haven't done anything yet so everything is new and original so as you get older I think the revelation is that things become ever more challenging and exciting at the same time you feel that something really disastrous can happen tomorrow and then when it happens you think well I knew this was coming I just it's a little bit like what they say in boxing I went to wrote a book on boxing that came out in 1987 it's had other editions so I've been writing about boxing for many many years those of you who are interested in I'm saying no they say that the the the the punch that knocks you out is the one you don't see coming so really good boxers are watching they're watching the other at the opponent's hands you know and that sometimes are moving so fast that with a jab here that direct the attention to this and then they come around with a left hook or something and the person's knocked out and those blows the boxers never see coming and until they see the the film or the video they see the video what happened to them and they but they didn't understand that at the time because it happened so fast especially when a boxer was really fast like Muhammad Ali so I think that's probably something that you learn as you get older that the anxieties that you anticipate don't happen you're worried about something over here but what will really happen is something that comes through the periphery of your vision and you never anticipate and therefore-- there's no way to pop there's no way to prepare for it so there's not my no point in being anxious about anything yes sir I think it's fair to say that Princeton is a community that has a very high self regard and person has high self regard that's a that's a tweet good get your your portrait of the community in the occurrence I mean your portrait of the community and the accursed is is far from flattering and so I'm wondering if you had an intention in writing the novel to to put forward a revisionist picture of that community and also I'm wondering what the reaction was among your colleagues at the University or in the community did they embrace this this critical view of their community and its characters such as that's a good question obviously most people haven't read the novel so I just talking a little bit about it but the the the portrait of fruit stone was meant to be actually a portrait of pretty much America at that time white upper-middle class affluent America it could be some other it could be Boston let's say but it was Princeton since I knew that 1905 or 6 as pre-world War one pre depression you know pre-world War two so it's a long time ago the prints emetic that exists now is very different from that for instance some of the same old houses are there the big old wealthy houses are still there the names of the streets and the avenues and the names of the houses and the names of the university buildings are still there so it's like it's preserved but there's a new Princeton there's a new Princeton because I was mentioning a few of minutes ago that it was a time of a racism white white people like 99% of white people thought that they were in every way superior to to Negroes Negroes were their servants or their slaves they didn't question us and they didn't think that they were evil for thinking that they just soon that that was the way what were there Wilson became President of the United States some years ago some years later he actually took for granted that there were two races and the the white majority superior race and then the sort of servile race of X slaves so none of that none of that is relevant in Princeton today it's really a different community therefore nobody that I ran into certainly not my colleagues or friends would challenge me on that but I wouldn't meet these people and these are the people who would who wouldn't meet me so I don't know what they're saying also the focus on women's rights you see in the 19th century and up until relatively recent decades even into the 1950s to be female was to be an aberrant specimen because the male was the main the male was the norm so if you were a medical person reading about medical theory writing about science I write about psychology was always the male model and then the female was a sort of strange aberrant may maimed castrated vision version of the male so I'm certainly writing about that and what else did you say there was some interesting other question that you asked some other sub question that was did you intend to revise yes yes I was looking at Woodrow Wilson and other people with unsentimental eyes and none of the nothing in the novel except the demons is really invented I mean everything the kind of crazy sexist and racist things that people say in a novel they really did say some of the lines I took from Woodrow Wilson's letters and he did really say the things like that but Princeton University today is a completely diverse University we have every every ethnic type every every skin tone color we've had remarkable presidents we've had our first woman president at a university where Woodrow Wilson was would have fainted at the idea of a woman president he would have just thought it was literally obscene he was making jokes about about women that I don't think are funny at all and he had a lot of jokes you know a little little black boys so his humor was a sort of thing that today which is to be considered politically politically incorrect thank you what happens are you a writer yes well first of all it's very important that you have like a cooling-off period you get so excited writing you know it's very thrilling and there's a severed rental in Rush and it's really very very thrilling but I think you need a the critical response to your own writing can only come a little later if you read it the next morning you're still in that kind of cocoon of excitement so I'll put the manuscripts away for a few months and then look at them again and in between I've done other things I like to do book reviews I love I love writing book reviews that I love to read sympathetic and intelligent book reviews so that's a nice contrast to writing fiction there was a novel of mine called the grave diggers daughter that I put away for two years two years I was maybe a little afraid to publish that I couldn't write that until after my parents had died I guess I felt I shouldn't but they did my parents died but I still didn't bring that I didn't bring that out of the drawer for a while and I would sort of lie in bed thinking what if I die now you know writers are so so self-absorbed and narcissistic I guess you always think oh oh you think I'm gonna die before I finish this but then when you're all done you think that oh no I'm so sad and I'll only in melancholy my wrists my novel first you're miserable and excited and anxious because you're sure you're gonna die before you finish it but then when you finish it the next week you're really lonely and melancholy and I just wish that you miss your anxiety and life gets so easy after them so I would read the novel out and finally and and published I have short stories that are published in in magazines like I also have another book right around now called evil eye which is for novellas and those are actually long stories I think somebody got the idea of calling them novellas it sounds more classy they're long long stories and not not short stories but somewhat long stories like thirty five forty pages those stories come out in magazines or literary magazines or like The New Yorker or Harper's or whatever so that you open it and you read it as a reader and just see your story and columns of print and that's very educational you read your own story and you think well this is too long here or I needed something more this is too sketchy so that's a like a second reading and editing when you see it in print and then you're bringing in two hardcover so my hardcover books I always have material different from the magazines I always change them and I consider that very important so all this suggests a period of time that you don't get with tweeting your tweeting is instantaneous and fleeting and transient but writing is something that has claimed to be more permanent and takes more time thank you thanks to a cleverly written interview with you published in the book that advertised or the publication that advertised this festival oh yes myself entomb you know if I run into you in the grocery store not to say are you Jill do that yeah my question is do you feel like you're two different people when you're shopping you totally live the writer aside I I ask that because I feel like the writing thing is a very powerful thing once you get into several books there's an expectation this isn't just writing this is Joyce Carol Oates writing it better be that thing instead of just anybody writing and so I'm curious about that part are you a person writing or are you now that character that you've sort of created as the writer well that's a very profound question it seems like a philosophical question like thought philosophy 500 or something well all of you in the room have identities are not your full identity they survive you you're all children your daughters or sons of somebody you're probably brothers or sisters or our fathers or mothers and you have all these roles that some of us are teachers or professors and some of us are writers and these these roles that we have come together in in a way to create an identity but if you didn't have any of those roles at all and you're just sort of backpacking and in the Yukon you would probably have an identity that was more your own complete essence you know like you're nobody's son and nobody's brother and nobody's father and and you're not teaching and your students don't know where you are you know and you'd be all alone camping out so what would that personality be that would be your personality prevalent if nobody was with you but we almost never are in situations like that we almost never go away and when people go backpacking or camping they often go with another person so the the expectation that there's another person there always draws out of you or so yourself that could be quasi hypocritical quasi sincere but it's not your essence that's why the religious mystics and holy men and women of tradition would go away by themselves and they would fast and be alone and some of them was swore to silence they took it like Trappist monks took a vow of silence they didn't talk to one another and so they were trying to find the essence I have to say that if I were all alone and could have talked to anybody and couldn't do my Twitter and couldn't take care of my husband who many wise will agree a husband takes a lot of care if I could do all those things I'm not sure who I would be but what I'm alone with my writing especially if it's uninterrupted there comes to be a sense of a personality that's a little deeper than a surface you know may not be the deepest it may be it may not be like Thomas Merton in his you know seven story mount and the mystic it may not be that deep but it is a deeper self than just the the social cell yes the first thing that I wanted to say is it's not really a question I I write poetry and I like when people come up to me and talk to me about how their poems meant something to them and I met my second husband in a book club because of we were the Mulvaney's and it was very interesting that the ending threw so many people off in the book club and that's how we sort of got together it was a book club for separated and divorced people so I just wanted to throw that out there well that's interesting thank you the second thing is the novella I think that you wrote about Mark Twain yes the daughters now that this is my real question that was just my kind of intro comment that really has stayed with me I have not been able to read Mark Twain since I I read that amazing a really amazing short story it touched on like my personal history which I don't want to go - but it's very very affecting and it just really was thank you all home tastic and I just wondered where did where did that come from POC Clemens and an angelfish that's from reality that's history and I did research into Mark Twain's old his later years so I've been told that I'm in overtime now and that soon I'm going to be I'm going to be a drawer add row and is going to evaporate me so thank you thank you very much this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 9,929

Rating: 4.8125 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, National Book Festival (Recurring Event), Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Id: uf38NiwaQL0

Length: 46min 17sec (2777 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2014