Harriett Gilbert talks to the hugely acclaimed writer DBC Pierre about his best-selling first novel Vernon God Little. An absurdly humorous look at the misadventures of a Texas teen named Vernon Little whose best friend has just killed 16 of their classmates and himself. In the wake of the tragedy, the townspeople seek both answers and vengeance; because Vernon was the killer's closest friend, he becomes the focus of their fury.
Hailed by the critics and lauded by readers for its riotous and scathing portrayal of America in an age of trial by media, materialism, and violence, Vernon God Little was an international sensation when it was first published in 2003 and awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize.
(Photo: DBC Pierre outside BBC Old Broadcasting House)
Katy Waldman is joined by NPR's Hanna Rosin and Slate's Laura Bennett to sort through their respective feelings on Emma Cline's novel, The Girls.
Join us in October for a conversation about two books: Underground Airlines by Ben Winters and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.
Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at Audible.com/AudioBookClub.
Katy Waldman is joined by Slate's Dan Kois and L.V. Anderson to discuss the play by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne – Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at Audible.com/AudioBookClub.
Slate critic, Katy Waldman, is joined by Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review and culture critic, Meghan O'Rourke, to discuss Rebecca Traister's All the Single Ladies. Next month, Slate's Audio Book Club will discuss The Girls by Emma Cline. Read the book and join us for a conversation in August! Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at Audible.com/AudioBookClub
We talking to acclaimed Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez about his dark and compelling novel The Sound of Things Falling. Vasquez explores the recent tortured history of his home country through a complex interweaving of personal stories and confronts the disastrous consequences of the war between the drugs cartels and government forces which played out so violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above.
After witnessing a friend’s murder, Antonio discovers the many ways in which his own and other lives have been deformed by his country’s recent brutal past. His journey leads him back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change; a time before drug-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.
(Photo: Juan Gabriel Vasquez. Credit: Hermance Triay)
Katy Waldman, Emily Bazelon, and Jessica Winter discuss Curtis Sittenfeld's modern retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Eligible. Next month, the Audio Book Club will dig into All The Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister. Read the book and stay tuned for our discussion in July!
Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.
And by Texture, the mobile app that gives you full access to more than 150 of the world's most popular magazines, anytime, using your phone or tablet. Read Vogue, People, Esquire, Time—and hundreds more—from back issues to the one currently on the newsstand. Right now, try Texture for free at Texture.com/ABC.
This month we’re in The Book Lounge Bookshop in Cape Town, South Africa and talking to the Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng about his Man Asian Literary Prize-winning novel, The Garden of Evening Mists.
This haunting tale, set in the jungles of Malaya during and after World War II, centres on Yun Ling, the sole survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in which her sister perished.
Driven by the desire to honour her sister’s memory through the creation of a lush and sensuous garden Yun Ling falls into a relationship with the enigmatic Japanese gardener Aritomo and begins a journey into her past, inextricably linked with the secrets of her troubled country’s history.
I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas, I live near towns called Kiowa and Cherokee. But for much of my life, despite my profession as an historian, names like these were just background noise in the everyday reality of my life, not reminders of the fact that Native Americans have lived in and with the presence of settlers for centuries.
Andrew Woolford has done much to help me recognize and understand this. Woolford is one of the preeminent scholars on the relationship between “natives” and settlers in the United States and Canada. He is also one of the most thoughtful voices in considering whether this relationship should be called genocidal.
In my discussion with him, we tried to get at the essence of his ideas by looking at three of his works. We begin with the volume of essays he co-edited with Alexander Hinton and Jeff Benvenuto, titled Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. The book collects the contributions of a variety of authors researching the issue. The essays generally offer focused examinations of specific issues of events. But the editors also offer valuable reflections on what we know and don’t know about the subject. It’s an outstanding resource for people interested in the question broadly. We then move on to Woolford’s own work, titled This Benevolent Experiment:Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).The book is a wonderful examination of the Indigenous school systems in Canada and the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Woolford extracts from his research a wonderful new metaphor to illustrate the way in which genocide worked in North America, one that has much broader utility in the field. And he offers a careful, well-reasoned explanation for why he thinks genocide is indeed the most appropriate term for the cultural and physical violent that characterized the period. Both books are excellent.
Finally, while we didn’t have much time to address it specifically, Woolford edited a recent special edition of the Journal of Genocide Research focusing on the topic. It’s also a rich source of information and insight.
Put together, the three works offer perhaps the best way into the growing field of genocide studies in North America.
To celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, World Book Club travels back to Victorian England to discuss her captivating and enduring tale, Jane Eyre with writer Tracy Chevalier and biographer Claire Harman in a packed BBC Radio Theatre.
The novel traces the fortunes of a young orphaned girl searching for a sense of belonging and identity in a hostile world, plagued by both gender and social inequality.
Weaving together the sweeping romance between Jane and Mr Rochester, a social commentary on nineteenth century England and set against the eerie Gothic backdrop of imposing mansions and wild moorland, Brontë has produced one of the world’s most loved and timeless tales.
(Photo: Charlotte Bronte. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Katy Waldman, Laura Miller, and Susan Matthews discuss Hope Jahren's budding debut memoir, Lab Girl. Join us next month to discuss Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld.
Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.
And by Texture, the mobile app that gives you full access to more than 150 of the world's most popular magazines, anytime, using your phone or tablet. Read Vogue, People, Esquire, Time—and hundreds more—from back issues to the one currently on the newsstand. Right now, try Texture for free at Texture.com/ABC.
