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We'll be talking about it more later in the show.

The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I am Laura Bennett, features director of Slate and editor of the Slate Book Review,

and I am here in the studio in New York with Megan O'Rourke,

who is a culture critic for many places, including Slate,

actually the founder of the audio book club, which is very exciting, and the author of the book, Sun and Days, which just came out and everyone should take a look at.

And then on the phones in D.C. we have Katie Waldman, staff writer at Slate.

I am hosting today instead of our usual host, Katie, because she's knee-deep in a cover story.

She's writing this week, and we're trying to spare her any added mental labor. But before we dig in, I also wanted to say that next month's audiobook club is Hillary Clinton's What Happened.

So we're very excited about that one too. All right, today we

will be talking about Sally Rooney's very buzzy debut novel Conversations with Friends, which is

set in Dublin and follows a quartet of exceedingly verbal, miscellaneously pretentious characters as they befriend each other

and have affairs and fall in love and betray each other

and other psychosexual shenanigans.

We have Francis, who's our complicated and fascinating narrator,

who we will definitely talk about more, her former girlfriend,

current best friend, and partner in performing spoken word poetry, the brilliant and magnetic Bobby,

who is the kind of human around whom people tend to helplessly orbit. And then there's a married

couple consisting of B-ish list actor Nick, who has a notably

handsome face and a sculpted torso, and his far more compelling writer-wife, Melissa.

...