The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club's first ever live show.

We are recording this episode at Town Hall in Seattle, Washington.

Currently a city awash in literary types, thanks to the annual AWP conference.

Although honestly, Seattle is a pretty literary city even in the absence of AWP.

Thank you, everyone in Seattle for being here.

Let's please give it up for Seattle, Washington.

Woo!

I am here up on the stage at Town Hall with Hanna Rosen, who's a slate writer and founder of Double X.

Hello, Hannah.

Hi, Dan.

And also joining us is our first ever special guest book club member, Hugh Howie, who is the author of Wool, and a new Amazon Kindle World Story, Peace and Amber.

Hello, Hugh.

Hi.

Thanks for having me.

So we're here today to talk about Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse Five. It's the story of Billy Pilgrim, who has come unstuck in time. He lives through the bombing of Dresden. He lives through his sad middle-aged life, and he lives through being kidnapped by Charles Famadorians. But of course,

one of the things that we'll talk about is really the story is not just about all of that, but it's

about the sad story of private Kurt Vonnegut, who kind of lost everything in the firebombing

of Dresden in World War II. Because this is a book club, we will be behaving as if we read the book,

even though as with all book clubs, none of us actually read the book. But so if you are afraid of spoilers of Slaughterhouse 5 and you're listening

to us on your iPod or whatever, you should pause it and go read Slaughterhouse 5 and then

unpause it and come back. Our conversation will likely go all over the place. We typically hit a lot of topics in these

...