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the audio book club: Discussing new and classic works.

The Audio Book ClubOur critics discuss Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.

By Meghan O'Rourke, Katie Roiphe, and James Surowiecki
Posted Thursday, Jan. 3, 2008, at 12:19 PM ET

To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club on Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, click the arrow on the player below.

You can also download the audio file here, or click here to subscribe to the Slate Audio Book Club feed in iTunes.

The Audio Book Club kicks off the new year with a lively discussion of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which won the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction. Slate literary editor Meghan O'Rourke, Slate contributor and NYU professor Katie Roiphe, and Slate contributor and New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki debate the merits of Johnson's novel. Does it deserve the acclaim it received, or is it a wildly overrated book, as an Atlantic essay recently suggested? And what does the "tree of smoke" refer to? The 45-minute conversation explores these and many other questions.

If you'd like to get an early start on the next book-club selection, we've chosen Elizabeth Gilbert's best seller, Eat, Pray, Love, which Katie Roiphe described as a "transcendently great beach book" in her July 2007 review. Watch for—and listen to—our Audio Book Club about Eat, Pray, Love in early February.

You can also listen to any of our previous club meetings by clicking on the links below*:

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 . (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.

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Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and an advisory editor, and she is the author of Halflife, a collection of poetry. Katie Roiphe is the author of Still She Haunts Me. James Surowiecki writes the financial column at The New Yorker.
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