Hello, I'm David Haglin, and this is the Slate Audio Book Club.

Before we begin, I want to mention our upcoming live show in Seattle.

It's the first ever live audio book club, and it's happening at Town Hall on Thursday, February 27th,

which is the week of the AWP conference.

Hannah Rosen and Dan Coice from Slate will be joined by Hugh Howie, who is the author of the mega bestselling science fiction series Wool. And they're going to talk about Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. They're also going to talk about Vonnegut's career more generally and also about fan fiction. Howie is a trendsetter in that he encourages fans to write

fan fiction in the wool universe that he's created and even lets them sell it on Amazon. And this

month, Amazon is publishing his own fan fiction set in the universe of Kurt Vonnegut. So they'll talk

about that. They'll talk about Slaughterhouse 5 and they'll take questions. Tickets are only $10.

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

Again, that is slate.com slash Seattle ABC.

So this month, we are discussing Mary McCarthy's 1963 bestseller, The Group.

And I am joined by memoirist and poet and former culture editor of Slate Megan O'Rourke.

Hello, Megan.

Hi, David.

And I'm also joined by Slate editor Emily Bazelon.

Hey, Emily.

Hey, guys.

So the group is a novel about eight Vassar friends who graduate in 1933, and it focuses on the first, let's see, six years of their post-college

lives, six, seven years. It famously begins with the wedding of Kay, who is sort of the center

of the group, I think. And I believe all three of us had read this book before. So I thought

we could talk first about what it was like to read this

book a second time, whether you enjoyed it more, less, differently. And I'll start with you,

...