The Audio Book Club on Anna Karenina
Our critics discuss Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece.
Posted Thursday, June 5, 2008, at 7:05 AM ET
To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, click the arrow on the player below.
This month, Stephen Metcalf, Troy Patterson, and Katie Roiphe take on Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, a sprawling novel about life and death, marriage and adultery, spiritual longing, and agriculture. What do the book-club participants make of the most famous study of infidelity in literature? It's Metcalf's favorite novel, Roiphe has read it four times, and although Patterson concedes that it's "perfect," he's the biggest detractor in the group. The book runs more than 850 pages, but this discussion lasts just 44 minutes.
If you'd like to get an early start on the next book-club selection, we've chosen Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, which New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner described as "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell." We'll post that discussion in early July.
You can also listen to any of our previous club meetings by clicking on the links below *:
Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock
All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Independence Day, by Richard Ford
The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Everyman, by Philip Roth
Saturday, by Ian McEwan
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
Questions? Comments? Write to us at podcasts@slate.com. (E-mailers may be quoted by name unless they request otherwise.)
* To download the MP3 file,right-click (Windows) or hold down the Control key while you click (Mac), and then use the "save" or "download" command to save the audio file to your hard drive.
Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.
Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.
Katie Roiphe, professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, is the author most recently of Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages, and the forthcoming In Praise of Messy Lives.