Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. I'm June Thomas, and today our club members are discussing The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Here's your host, Megan O'Rourke. Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. I'm Megan O'Rourke, Slate's literary editor. Joining me today is Katie

Royfey, who teaches in the Cultural Criticism Program at NYU, and is the author of And Still She Haunts Me and the forthcoming Uncommon Arrangements. Also joining us is John Burnham Schwartz, author of Claire Marvell, Bicycle Days, and Reservation Road,

which is being made into a movie, and also the author of the forthcoming novel, The Commoner.

We are here today to talk about Cormick McCarthy's novel The Road, which was recently selected

as an Oprah Book Club pick. That's not why we've selected it, although we are hoping that maybe we'll

talk about that just a little bit. So we're going to jump straight into the novel, but first I'll say

a few words about it for those of us who are joining us. And again, I just want to remind anyone

who started to listen to the podcast that we do talk about the entire novel. So if you haven't

finished it yet, you might want to wait until you finish, although this is not a novel that really has a plot. So, you know, in a sense,

once you've started, you can probably join, but you might want to wait. So the road is the story

of a father and son who are walking through a kind of scorched earth post-apocalyptic landscape

that we take to be America sometime in the future. Some kind of scorched earth post-apocalyptic landscape that we take to be America

sometime in the future. Some kind of catastrophe, probably a nuclear catastrophe, has occurred,

although we don't know exactly what has happened. All we get is at one point the description

that a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions took place.

And after that, everything has changed.

The world has become a place of ash and emptiness.

Very few animals, if any, seem to be alive.

There are roving bands of warriors in a kind of mad-max scenario running around the country, eating one another, capturing people as slaves. It's really

things have gone far downhill. The clock stopped at 117, although he mentions no year or

months ago. That's right. Yeah. But it seems to be mid to late fall. It seems to be that they're in

some part of the Appalachian, maybe the sort of Tennessee, and they're

...