Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read, the cow goes moon.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I'm very honored to have as my guest, Joyce Carol Oates, whose new novel,

The Graveddicker's Daughter, has just been published by Echo.

I think that writers, however gifted, have certain novels that speak deeply to their most primary themes,

and these are the occasions when a writer is capable,

is given the opportunity to produce a masterpiece,

which I think is the case in Joyce Carol Oates' new novel,

The Gravedigger's Daughter.

Now, as I understand this, this novel, which goes back

to some of your earliest backgrounds in upstate

New York, not only in your upbringing, but in the novels that you wrote in your early

years that were set there, this is an altered vision, altered by a discovery that you made in the last 10 years about your grandparents.

Yes, I found out a good deal of family history because a biographer, Greg Johnson, who was my

biographer, was interviewing my parents, and then my father went to court records,

and he looked into family history and discovered that, to his astonishment,

his mother had been Jewish.

She did not seem to have had any religion or even any ethnic identity.

...