The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for the month of April 2017.

I'm Katie Waldman, a staff writer at Slate, and I'm in New York today speaking to two brilliant but disembodied voices.

The first belongs to Megynorke, a writer and critic and

frequent friend of the podcast, calling in from elsewhere in New York. Hey, Megan. Hey, Katie.

And the second voice is Nora Kaplan Bricker, a writer and frequent slate contributor. Hey, Nora.

Hi, Katie. And where are you in space at this point? I'm in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Awesome. Well, our book today is Lincoln and the Bardo by George Saunders. But before we dive in,

I want to let everyone know that next month's book will be pretty timely. It's The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood,

so please join us next month. Our book today is Lincoln and the Bardo by George Saunders.

We discussed his wonderful short story collection 10th of December on this very podcast.

Lincoln and the Bardo takes, as its jumping off point,

the death of Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son, Willie, in February of 1862. Willie's soul

awakens an Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, where he meets an assortment of ghosts lingering

for whatever reason on their path to the beyond. These spirits become a kind of chorus narrating

the grief of Abraham Lincoln,

who comes to visit his son's crypt and hold his body in his arms.

It's a high wire premise and Saunders approaches it with his signature mix

of savage comedy and empathic sweetness, even schmaltziness.

I'm dying to know what you guys thought of it because I have a thousand passionate opinions and they all contradict each other.

So if either of you just wants to start us off with a general reaction to Lincoln and the Bardo.

Sure. So, you know, I'm a huge Honduras fan and I think when he's writing at his best, he really is a remarkable, you know, not only a remarkable innovator, which he certainly is in this book, I think one thing we'll have to talk about is its innovativeness and its formal, you know, what it's trying to do with form, which is pretty radical.

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