OK, So I'm Not Joyce Carol Oates

COMMENTARY

The National Mall was crowded with portable toilets, poets, and the reading public. White wedding tents, artfully arranged, suggested an inauguration or some other federal affair. With the bonus of a paint-chip-perfect blue sky, it was just the right September setting in which to celebrate some of our nation's living literary monuments at the 2007 National Book Festival in Washington.

I was in the fiction tent. Up front, Joyce Carol Oates prepared to speak. Her

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