The Audio Book Club on Swamplandia!

Our critics discuss Karen Russell's lively novel Swamplandia!

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In this month's Audio Book Club, Slate's Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and Hanna Rosin discuss Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, a new novel about two sisters and a brother raised on an island off the coast of Florida, where their family runs an alligator-wrestling theme park, whose lives spiral out of control after the death of their mother. Dickerson analyzes the book's puncturing of a family's mythology. Bazelon wonders whether Russell carries off her use of ghosts to move the plot. Rosin defends the book as a moving coming-of-age story that draws power from its unlikely setting.

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Room, by Emma Donoghue
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon
Remainder, by Tom McCarthy
Great House, by Nicole Krauss
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
Super Sad Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart
The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman
Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis
Reality Hunger, by David Shields
To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
White Noise, by Don DeLillo
Lit, by Mary Karr
The Original of Laura, by Vladimir Nabokov
"A Small Good Thing" and "The Bath," by Raymond Carver
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
A Vindication of Love, by Cristina Nehring
Thy Neighbor's Wife, by Gay Talese
"The Swimmer," by John Cheever, and "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," by Flannery O'Connor
Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galchen
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Night of the Gun, by David Carr
American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock
All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
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

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