Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 325 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner with the audio player below.

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This week on the Slate Culture Gabfest, the critics discuss the new adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon. Can this doyenne of perk and pluck go serious and outdoorsy? Next, the critics take a walk through MOMA’s hit exhibition of Matisse’s cutout works and talk to its curator and conservator, Jodi Hauptman and Karl Buchberg. Finally, Dan Kois joins the gabbers to talk about the Second Novel List, a new project with the Whiting Foundation celebrating sophomore literary achievements.

Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:

• Dana’s review of Wild, at Slate
• Walk the Line
• Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City
• Richard Ford’s Independence Day
• J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
• Matisse Cutouts at MoMA.
• The five second-novel write-ups at Slate:
  • Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
  • Inferno by Eileen Myles
  • At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón
  • The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
  • Family Life by Akhil Sharma
• The McSweeney’s annotated excerpt from Chabon’s lost novel

Endorsements:

Dana: Buying your books online from Powell’s

Julia: Posteritati, the movie poster store (and their Twitter)

Steve: Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

Outro: “Oxford Comma” by Vampire Weekend

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Ann Hepperman. Our intern is Josephine Livingstone.

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