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Welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of

the Good Lord Bird, the National Book Award winning novel by James McBride. I'm Dan Coise, editor of the

Slate Book Review, and I'm here in Slate's DC Recording Studio. In our New York studio is David Hagelin,

Slate's Brabid editor. Hi, David. Hi, Dan. And Emily Bazelon, a Slate senior editor. Hi, Emily.

Hey, Dan. Before we begin, some news about a future audiobook club. Tickets are now on sale for our first ever live

audiobook club. We will be in Seattle, Washington, at Town Hall on Thursday, February 27th. It's the week of the AWP conference in Seattle. This is going to be an extremely fun show. It's going to be Hannah Rosen and me, and then we will be joined by Hugh Howie, who is the author of the mega bestselling science fiction series Wool. It's also really great, in addition to being mega bestselling. But we're not going to talk about Wool. We're going to talk about Slaughterhouse 5 and Kurt Vonnegut.

Hugh Howie is sort of a trendsetter in that he encourages his fans to write fan fiction in the universe of wool,

and then he lets them sell it on Amazon's Kindle World's platform.

And this very month, actually, Amazon is publishing Hugh Howie's fan fiction set in the

Kurt Vonnegut universe. It's called Peace and Amber. So anyways, he has thought a lot about

Vonnegut and about writing about Vonnegut and in Vonnegut's world. And so we'll talk Slaughter

Slaughterhouse Five and fan fiction and science fiction in general. I think it should be really fun. Tickets

are a mere $10.

And you can buy them by going to slate.com slash Seattle ABC.

That address again, slate.com slash Seattle ABC.

Thank you for indulging this interlude of ad sales, Emily and David.

Hey, whatever we can do for the cause.

So, The Good Lord Bird, as always in the audiobook club, if you don't like being spoiled,

please listen after you read.

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