Thanks for listening to Bookworm. I'm host Michael Silverblatt. If there's another podcast that comes from us at KCRW that I really like is the treatment with Elvis Mitchell. I've said it for a long time. Elvis's style of interviewing is like jazz. He orchestrates so many interesting moments and gets people to say such surprising

and interesting things about film, about popular culture. He really knows his subject, and he's

one of the very best in the country. Listen to the treatment. Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos? Where would we be without good?

No, Tos into the bird. It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without good old Toad the bird It's a rhetorical question, sir,

but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com,

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today it's my pleasure to talk to Joyce Carroll Oates

about her new novel, The Sacrifice.

I've been talking to Joyce Carol Oates since we were both children, I'm afraid.

It really is true. I think I was 16 when we met.

Yes, you were a precocious undergraduate.

Now, the sacrifice is one of the most harrowing books I've read recently.

Can you tell me how you selected the story that is in the background of the book to become a novel?

I think that I always had wanted to write about people who were caught up in an episode

of some public controversy who were completely innocent and in a way at the margin and how

they're caught up in in and their lives are changed

it's as if a tornado came along and whirled people around and then flung them down

you know miles away from where they had been

so when i was living in princeton

...