Listen to author Mary Roach discuss her new book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal:

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Mary Roach prides herself on exploring places that make us uncomfortable. Her first book, Stiff, chronicled what happens to corpses after we die. When I interviewed her in 2008 about her book on sex, Bonk, she shared footage of her and her husband having intercourse. (Trust me, it’s the most G-rated sex tape you’ll ever see.) Her latest book, Gulp, takes us to places we depend on for our very lives but that most of us would prefer not to see: our mouths, stomachs, and intestines. Listen to Roach’s April 6 talk at Politics & Prose, in which she ponders questions like “Why would we be repulsed by spitting into our own bowl of soup, when the same soup comes into contact with the same saliva in our mouths?”

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