Preservation and the literary editor of civilization a former book editor and odcolumnist and former editor at the Washington Post. His essays and reviews of fiction have appeared in numerous publications including americann scholar , american short fiction the Atlantic Monthly the new republic and the smithsonian and Washington Post magazine and on the atbat one oped open in pages the New York Times and usa today and the Washington Post he lives in virginia please give a warm welcome to robert wilson. [applause] thank you. I appreciate your introduction work i hope your app works better than the iowa caucuses. [laughter] thank you to all of you for coming this morning on this cold morning its good to see so many of youou here and i want to thank cspan for all it does to support but culture in america. I would be tempted to say normally its very easy to be optimistic about the state of books. I love being here in savannah. We live outside of washington dc with a place on panhandle of f