Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Pub for July.

I am Katie Waldman, Slate's words correspondent, and I am joined here in the DC studio today by Hannah Rosen.

Hi, Katie.

Hello.

And Jamel Bowie.

Hello, Katie.

And I should say that Jamel is a staff writer for Slate, and Hannah is, Hannah, what are you? You're everything. I'm a writer for Atlantic. I write for Slate, the Atlantic. We'll just leave it at that. Okay. And they are also right now, most importantly, audio book club gurus and bright lights. So I can't wait to hear what you guys made of this book. It is Station

11 by Emily St. John Mandel. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award. It's gotten

wonderful reviews and has also stirred up a little bit of confusion in terms of genre, like

what category it actually falls into. Is it science fiction? Is it literary fiction? But before we

get into any of those issues, maybe we should just orient people by saying what happens in this book.

What happens in this book? Okay, there's a plague. That's the essential thing you need to know about

this book. And the plague works as quickly as any plague you'll ever read about.

You get it.

You are dead in three days.

And basically it spreads.

It's a virus that spreads as quickly as any virus will ever spread.

So the end of the world comes instantaneously.

And I would say that Emily St.

John Mandel, which we'll talk about, does not dwell on that.

You just kind of assumed it just happened. It happened. It happened. I would say that Emily St. John Mandel, which we'll talk about, does not dwell on that.

You just kind of assumed it just happened. It happened and everybody is dead. So it's very little in the way of sort of details about the complete collapse of civilization.

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