Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm the program's producer Andy Bowers,

and our subject today is the novel Beloved by Tony Morrison.

Our critics have assembled at a New York cafe,

and they're ready to discuss the book The New York Times recently dubbed

The Best Novel of the Last Quarter Century.

We'll see what they think right after this.

The definition of performance has just been rewritten. Introducing the high-performance

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from the world. Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm Slate's culture editor, Megan O'Rourke, and I'm here today with Katie Roifie,

author of Still She Haunts Me and Stephen Metcalf, Slate's Critic at Large.

We're here at the Housing Works used bookstore and cafe in Soho, New York,

and we'll be discussing Tony Morrison's Beloved.

Beloved was recently chosen as the best work of American fiction published in the past 25

years by a panel of critics and readers in the New York Times book review, which is what prompted

us to read it today. Only one of us had previously read the book, I believe, right? Katie, you had read the book before, and neither Stephen nor I had read it. So we've both read it recently in sort of the context of this choice. So we'll talk about that a little bit later on. Why don't I do a quick recap of the plot? It's very complicated, so I'm just going to do the most basic, and we'll get into that a little bit more.

But Beloved is the story of a woman named Sita, we think that's how it's pronounced,

who was a former slave in a plantation called Sweet Home in the pre-Civil War years.

She has escaped from the plantation.

This is now after the war.

The book is set in 1873, I believe.

...