The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club for the month of November. I'm Katie Waldman, Slate's

Words Correspondent, and I'm joined today in the New York studio by Slate Book Critic, Laura Miller.

Hey, Laura. Hi, Katie. And by our chief political correspondent, Jamel Bowie, coming in from D.C.

Hi, Jamel.

Hello.

So it's a pretty raw moment, but we continue to believe here at Slate.com that works of imagination and empathy are worth highlighting in dark political times.

And I think that the two books will be discussing today resonate especially powerfully with what's happening in the country right now.

So those books are the Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Underground Airlines by Ben Winters, taking slavery and race more broadly as their theme.

These are books that reimagine the past or contrive a parallel present in ways

that shed light on our actual past and present. And I thought maybe we could start with the

Underground Railroad and then move on to Underground Airlines and then hold them up side by side,

if that sounds good to you guys. Sounds great. Awesome. So I guess the really interesting promise of the underground

railroad is that it takes the idea of an underground railroad literally and instead of having

a network of black and white people who support abolition, ferrying slaves from slave states

to northern free states, you actually have

an underground railroad with conductors and tracks and cars. And I wonder if either of you

have an opening thought on why Whitehead would make that choice and what it does to the reader to sort of literalize that metaphor.

Well, I'll just jump in. I mean, I think part of it is that he's always been obsessed with New York City. I mean, he spent his youth here and he wrote a book about walking through New York City. And so I think part of it is just, I mean,

I believe he said that as a child, he sort of was confused about it and thought it might be a

real railroad. And so a novelist will often take some sort of mistake or dream or image from

their past and spend a whole book out of it. But I think it makes, I mean, the important thing that it does is it signals that it's, that this isn't really a historical novel and that it's not supposed to be historically accurate. And I also think that the different places that Kora

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