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The Audio Book Club on All the King's MenOur critics discuss Robert Penn Warren's great political novel.

By Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner, and Jacob WeisbergPosted Thursday, March 13, 2008, at 7:12 AM ET

To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, click the arrow on the player below.

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

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. This month, the Audio Book Club chews over Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel All the King's Men.

Slate critic-at-large Stephen Metcalf, culture editor Julia Turner, and Editor Jacob Weisberg discuss the changes made to the "restored" edition, contemplate Penn Warren's vision of American fascism, and debate the racial views expressed in the novel. They also agree that it's the last great American novel before Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. The conversation runs about 50 minutes.

If you'd like to get an early start on the next book-club selection, we've chosen Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock, which John Burdett, writing in the Washington Post, described as a novel that "deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter and the sensitivity with which [Bock] treats it." We'll post the discussion in early April.

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

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 . (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. Julia Turner is Slate's deputy editor. You can e-mail her at or follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/juliaturner. Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy. Follow him at http://twitter.com/jacobwe.

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