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the audio book club: Discussing new and classic works.

The Audio Book Club on Eat, Pray, LoveOur critics discuss Elizabeth Gilbert's blockbuster memoir.

By Stephen Metcalf, Katie Roiphe, and Julia Turner
Posted Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 1:13 PM ET

To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, 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.

Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia.

This month, the Audio Book Club presents a heated discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, which Katie Roiphe described as a "transcendently great beach book" in her July 2007 Slate review.

"Dilettante" columnist Stephen Metcalf, NYU professor Roiphe, and Slate culture editor Julia Turner argued about the book's artistic merits, its structure, and whether it's possible to even imagine a man enjoying the book. Is Gilbert merely a "high-level hack"? Are negative responses to the book evidence of the tendency to dismiss women who write memoirs as "self-indulgent"? The conversation runs about 55 minutes.

If you'd like to get an early start on the next book-club selection, we've chosen All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren, one of the greatest political novels in American literature. We'll post the discussion in early March, so you have some time to read—or reread—the book.

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

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 . (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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Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s. Katie Roiphe is the author of Still She Haunts Me. Julia Turner is Slate's deputy editor. You can e-mail her at .
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