Shows
Novel DialogueWe Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’AdíÁlvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel form. Álvaro, author of the trippy You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead, 2024), explains how the opening letter to his translator Natasha mirrors the letter to his editor, Teresa, in Spanish, and how both letters become part of the fiction. Fitting for a novel that crosses Nahua and Mayan, Moctezuma and Cortés, Mexican history and the glam rock band T. Rex. The English translation—which Álvaro calls the book of Natasha—is longer, filled with changes and additions and...2025-06-0547 minNovel Dialogue9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)In an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “i...2025-05-2250 minNovel Dialogue9.4 “That In Between Time,” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Scribner, 2024) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our world into something uncannily similar to the one imagined in the Uruguayan writer’s fourth novel. Here, an environmental disaster that begins as red algae bloom in the oceans has produced a toxic wind that kills most living creatures. As the plague spreads, the protagonist chooses to remain in her coastal city, caring for a boy with a rare genetic disorder. Published in an English translation by Heather Cleary as the pandemic waned, Pink Slime continues t...2025-05-0854 minNovel Dialogue9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020), his vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming...2025-04-2450 minNovel Dialogue9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew PepperWhat work can genre do today? And can the genre system become more than a method of reductive containment and market segmentation—can it be a generative source of imaginative chaos? Few are as qualified to address these questions as Lauren Beukes, whose simultaneous embrace of genres from science fiction to crime to horror and refusal to abide within their borders—what she calls her “Big Fuck You Energy”—has rendered her, by her own account, “basically un-shelve-able.” Beukes is joined by crime fiction scholar (and novelist) Andrew Pepper of Queen’s University Belfast for a conversation that dances across her oeuvre’s...2025-04-1049 minNovel Dialogue9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW)It’s a bit surprising to hear a writer known for building worlds that incorporate deep historical research and elaborate technological details extol the virtues of play, but Ken Liu tells critic Rose Casey and host Sarah Wasserman that if “your idea of heaven doesn’t include play, then I’m not sure it’s a heaven people want to go to.” It turns out that Ken—acclaimed translator and author of the “silkpunk” epic fantasy series Dandelion Dynasty and the award-winning short story collection The Paper Menagerie—is deeply serious about play. Speaking about play as the key to technological progress...2025-03-2748 minNovel Dialogue9 Trailer Writing Against the SystemWe kick off Season 9: TECH by talking with our very own Aarthi Vadde, the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Hosts and co-producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Aarthi about the role of the novel in relation to the mass writing platforms that dominate our digital lives. Aarthi is at work on a book called We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, and she explains how the novel can mark the invisible infrastructures of the internet, defamiliarize the “computational surround” of everyday life, and give us new angles on writing with and against bots. Join...2025-03-2134 minNovel Dialogue8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”Eighteenth century prison break artist and folk hero Jack Sheppard is among history’s most frequently adapted rogues: his exploits have inspired Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Bertolt Brecht, and most recently, Jordy Rosenberg, whose first novel, Confessions of the Fox (2018), rewrites Sheppard as a trans man and Sheppard’s partner Bess as a South Asian lascar and part of the resistance movement in the Fens. Rosenberg embeds the manuscript tracing their love story within a satirical frame narrative of a professor whose discovery of it gets him caught up in an absurd and increasingly alarming tussle with neoliberal academic bureau...2024-12-1952 minNovel Dialogue8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily HydeDuring a desert thunderstorm outside Tucson, Lydia Millet joined the Novel Dialogue conversation with hosts John Plotz and Emily Hyde, with Emily playing the role of critic. Lydia—author more than a dozen novels and story collections and recently the nonfictional We Loved it All (Norton, 2024)—also works at the Center for Biological Diversity. Wild creatures gambol, flap, swim, and crawl their way through her writing and her conversation: we begin in the Garden of Eden but quickly learn that for Lydia human exceptionalism is the original sin, one that continues to bedevil us in “the nuclear era” (or did she say ...2024-12-0553 minNovel Dialogue8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the U.S. army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which was a finalist for The National Book Award. Jamil joins Northwestern prof. Kalyan Nadiminti and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about narrative form and the cycles of war.We begin b...2024-11-2144 minNovel Dialogue8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War.Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Lud...2024-11-0730 minNovel Dialogue8.2 To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)An unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward failure and the limitations of language that Akbar discusses with critic Pardis Dabashi. In their conversation, Kaveh considers writing both as an escape from the confines of the self and as a vehicle for expressing its contradictions. Together they explore which forms might best capture the ambivalence and polyphony of the human mind, the contours of Iranian American identity, and the spiritual beauty of everyday existence. Whether discussing neurolinguistics or the affordances of poetry, Kaveh contemplates the limits of lan...2024-10-2548 minNovel Dialogue8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)What does it mean for a novel to think globally? And can a global novel concerned with the macro movements of capital and labor still exist in the form of a bildungsroman? This conversation between Lydia Kiesling and Megan Ward takes up questions of form and political consciousness in the novel, globality and rootedness, capitalism and the yearning for things, optimization and wellness culture, and so much more. Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree. Her second novel, Mobility, is the first book in a new imprint with Crooked Media. Lydia and Megan discu...2024-10-1048 minNovel Dialogue7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH)What’s the truth and what’s a lie? What’s a memoir, what’s a novel, and what if both are just a series of “prose blocks”? This conversation between Sarah Manguso and Tess McNulty takes up questions of writing and veracity, trauma and memory. Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including three memoirs. Her first novel, Very Cold People, was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and her second novel, Liars, is forthcoming. Tess and Sarah discuss how the threshold between truth and fiction is often used to minimize writing by women and how char...2024-06-2050 minNovel Dialogue7.5 Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)Building parallels between technology and the human imagination, Masande Ntshanga’s conversation with Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra explains how cities are like machines and how South African history resembles some of the most sinister versions of techno-futurism. Masande is the author of two novels: The Reactive, winner of a Betty Trask Award in 2018, and Triangulum, nominated for the 2020 Nommo Awards for Best Novel in 2020 by the African Speculative Fiction Society. His responses to Magalí’s questions interweave autobiography and history, showing how when you venture into “underwritten spaces” in South Africa, realism starts to seem like speculation. Masande moves from playing bootleg Nintend...2024-06-0650 minNovel Dialogue7.4 Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung SongOmar El Akkad joins critic Min Hyoung Song for a gripping conversation that interrogates fiction’s relationship to the real. Before he became a novelist, Omar was a journalist, and his experiencing reporting on (among other subjects) the war on terror, the Arab Spring, and the Black Lives Matter movement profoundly shapes his fiction. His first novel, American War (Vintage, 2018), follows the protagonist’s radicalization against the backdrop of afossil fuel-motivated civil war. His second, What Strange Paradise (Vintage, 2022), is a haunting retelling of Peter Pan focused on a young Syrian refugee. But as Omar and Min’s dialogue reveals, litera...2024-05-2453 minNovel Dialogue7.3 What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could get punched in the face.” Brandon, author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans, joins Stephanie Insley Hershinow for a wide-ranging, engrossing, and often hilarious conversation about the stakes of the novel today. They discuss Brandon’s “Hot Freud Summer,” during which he read all of Sigmund Freud’s essential works, as an example of an intellectual journey that engages with what Brandon calls the PDFs of criticism: the histories of ideas that he wishes to track b...2024-05-0947 minNovel Dialogue7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)Although Katie Kitamura feels free when she writes—free from the “soup of everyday life,” from the political realities that weigh upon her, and even at times from the limits of her own thinking—she is keenly aware of the unfreedoms her novels explore. Katie, author of the award-winning Intimacies (2021), talks with critic Alexander Manshel about the darker corners of the human psyche and the inescapable contours of history that shape her fiction. Alexander and Katie explore how she brings these tensions to “the space of interpretation, where the book exists” and places trust in her readers to dwell there thoughtfully...2024-04-2558 minNovel Dialogue7.1 Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds (JP)Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly makes time for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and ND host John Plotz. She reads from The Wren, The Wren (Norton, 2023) and discusses the “etherized” state of our inner lives as they circulate on social media. Anne says we don't yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority, but that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”--though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos...is not as interested in your period as you might think.”Anne speaks of “a momen...2024-04-1141 minNovel Dialogue6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny YudkoffSheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be" )--as well as the protagonist's temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and...2023-12-1444 minNovel Dialogue6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath (SW)Just days before the release of her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), three-time National Book Award Finalist and The New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff sat down to talk to critic Laura McGrath and host Sarah Wasserman. Although Groff admits that she wants “each subsequent book to destroy the one” that came before, writing is always for her an endeavor of focus, ritual, and most of all, love. Whether they retell foundational myths about the nation, as in The Vaster Wilds, or rethink the relationship between faith, nature, and desire, as does Matrix, Groff puts love for her character...2023-11-3048 minNovel Dialogue6.4 “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Norton, 2022), which won the Booker Prize in 2022, is a thriller that begins in the afterlife, an uproarious murder mystery set amid the tragedies of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Its protagonist, a war photographer, has become a ghost with just seven moons to find his killer and give his life’s work meaning. This is a historical novel that bends and twists genre and narrative into wondrous and disorienting knots and makes space for the cacophony of ghostly voices of those killed and disappeared in Sri Lanka. Shehan notes that if...2023-11-1646 minNovel Dialogue6.3 Narrative, Database, Archive: Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch (AV)2 tables; 300 novels, 1500 pages of nature description: This is how Tom Comitta created The Nature Book, a one-of-a-kind novel cut from 300 years of English literary tradition. It has no human characters, no original writing, and it is astoundingly good! Tom sits down with distinguished Harvard prof, Deidre Lynch and host Aarthi Vadde to talk about how they wrote a book out of found language. The conversation reveals why The Nature Book is so compelling: it scrambles the usual distinctions between narrative and database. It is fast-paced, propulsive, full of cliffhangers and yet also a “mood collage” composed of macro, m...2023-11-0241 minNovel Dialogue6.2 What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carringtonLocus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard for a conversation about the archives, methods, and cosmologies that inform his speculative fiction. Clark’s fiction blends fantasy and horror elements with richly drawn historical worlds that speak to his academic life as a historian. Most recently, Ring Shout (2020) maps Lovecraftian horror into the Ku Klux Klan’s 1920s terrorism in the U.S. South, while A Master Of Djinn (2021) brings angels and the titular djinns into a steampunk version of Egypt focalized around a pair of female detectives with the Mini...2023-10-1939 minNovel Dialogue6.1 Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling (CH)Our season of the weird starts off with a conversation between the writer The New Yorker called “the weird Thoreau”, Jeff VanderMeer, and a scholar of the modernist weird, Alison Sperling (FSU). With ND host Chris Holmes, Jeff and Alison delve into how the ugly politics of Lovecraft’s “old” weird gives rise to the stylistic panoply of the New Weird movement. Jeff discusses the ways in which nature writing's sublime and ecstatic moments are their own category of the weird. The three consider ways to represent unrepresentable species, the limits of human intelligence in perceiving animal intelligence, the nonhuman narr...2023-10-0541 minNovel DialogueWeirding Out with Kate MarshallWe kick off Season 6 with Kate Marshall, friend of the show and author of the forthcoming book Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century. Hosts and producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Kate about the pulpy literary history of weird tales and learn how in the 21st-century weirdness emerges as both genre and mood. The conversation roves from the weirdness of the weather to novels that long for the nonhuman and reach for alien perspectives to the genres responding to our climate crisis. Join us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 6 of Nov...2023-09-2124 minNovel Dialogue5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto (AV)Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Born in Sierra Leone, Aminatta is of Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity and, though she accepts the moniker of “African writer,” she rejects the double-standard of authenticity it implies. She also chafes against the Conradian image of Africa, which infused so many of her own literary encounters with her home continent. In response t...2023-06-1543 minNovel Dialogue5.5 They’re Not Metaphorical Demons: Mariana Enriquez and Magalí Armillas-TiseyraBooker Prize shortlister Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, joins Penn State professor Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra and host Chris Holmes to talk about her most recent novel, Our Share of Night, her first to be translated into English. Our Share of Night follows a spiritual medium, Juan, who can commune with the dead and with the world of demons, and his son, Gaspar, as they go on a road trip to outrun a secretive occult society called The Order that hopes to use Juan and Gaspar in their unholy quest for imm...2023-06-0156 minNovel Dialogue5.4 The Meat and Bones of LifeWith the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse, Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earlier fiction and ventures into horror. White Horse follows Kari, an urban Native living in Denver, as a family heirloom belonging to her long-missing mother launches her into a world of the uncanny: ghosts and monsters lurch into real life and portals transport her into scenes from the past that reveal traumatic family secrets.Wurth speaks with critic Leif Sorensen and host Rebecca Evans about what abides at the intersection of politics and craft, and what’s at sta...2023-05-1848 minNovel Dialogue5.3 “It’s on the Illabus”John Jennings—Hugo Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, curator, scholar, and Artist—is keenly aware that in adapting novels for the graphic format, his decisions turn what has only been imagined into facts drawn on the page. In this conversation with critic, translator, and teacher of a creative course on the art of making comics, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Jennings explores how he makes those decisions that range from the design of endpapers to selecting a character’s skin tone with the ultimate aim of championing Black culture and Black comics. Given that Jennings has just entered the Marvel Universe...2023-05-0445 minNovel Dialogue5.2 Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism--and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them?Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be...2023-04-2047 minNovel Dialogue5.1 We Have This-ness, Y’all!Season 5 of Novel Dialogue opens with an impassioned refresher course in literary theory brought to you by Ocean Vuong, poet and author of the bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Ocean talks with critic Amy E. Elkins and host Emily Hyde about browsing bookstore shelves and building his personal reading list of “life-giving weirdos.” They discuss genre and gender, antiquing and thrifting, fish sauce and photography, all the while integrating the insights of queer theory and the full range of literary history. What does looking at the world as a junkyard have to do with making art? What does i...2023-04-0654 minNovel Dialogue4.6 Translation is the Closest Way to Read: Ann Goldstein and Saskia ZiolkowskiIn our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of translation. Ann speaks to Duke scholar Saskia Ziolkowski and host Aarthi Vadde about being the face of the Ferrante novels, and the curious void that she came to fill in the public imagination in light of Ferrante’s anonymity. In a profession long characterized by invisibility, Ann reflects on her own celebrity and the changing orthodoxies of the book business. Where once having a translator’s name on a book cover would be sure to kill i...2022-11-1747 minNovel Dialogue4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKayWhat can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation into French of McKay’s 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth, which paints a satirical portrait of efforts by 1930s Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. B...2022-11-0349 minNovel Dialogue4.5a Novel Dialogue Bonus: Jean-Baptiste Naudy Reads from Claude McKay’s "Amiable with Big Teeth"In this bonus episode, Jean-Baptiste Naudy Reads from Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (English and French). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2022-11-0307 minNovel Dialogue4.4 “A short, sharp punch to the face”: José Revueltas’ The Hole (El Apando) with Alia Trabucco Zerán and Sophie Hughes.Alia Trabucco Zerán, award-winning author of The Remainder (La Resta), and Women Who Kill (Las Homicidas), and Sophie Hughes, Alia’s translator and finalist for the International Booker Prize talk with Novel Dialogue host Chris Holmes about a novel that has shaped their lives as writers and thinkers: The Hole by José Revueltas. Sophie and Alia discuss how The Hole, written while Revueltas was held in the infamous Lecumberri prison, purposefully makes readers feel lost in a small, confined space. Reading a section from her co-translation of The Hole, published in 1969 as El Apando, Sophie considers how the novel’s intense f...2022-10-2053 minNovel Dialogue4.3 Strange Beasts of Translation: Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang in ConversationYan Ge and Jeremy Tiang are both writers who accumulate languages. Sitting down with host Emily Hyde, they discuss their work in and across Chinese and English, but you’ll also hear them on Sichuanese, the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Yan Ge’s native Sichuan province, and on the Queen’s English as it operates in Singapore, where Jeremy grew up. Yan is an acclaimed writer in China, where she began publishing at age 17. She now lives in the UK. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out in English in 2020, in Jeremy’s translation. Jeremy, in addition to having tra...2022-10-0650 minNovel Dialogue4.2 Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah QuesadaBoubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, (Indiana UP, 2016; translated by Fiona McLaughlin), an unforgettable novel of the Rwandan genocide that blends journalistic research with finely drawn characterizations of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. In this episode, Mr. Diop reads from Murambi, translated from French by Fiona McLaughlin, and speaks to Duke professor Sarah Quesada and host Aarthi Vadde about how his work on the novel spurred him to rethink his language of composition. Mr. Diop wrote his first five novels in French, but after Murambi, shifted to Wolof, the most widely spoken language in his home c...2022-09-2232 minNovel Dialogue4.1 “Sometimes I’m just a little disappointed in English”A novelist, a translator and a theorist of translation walk into a Zoom Room......Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell, and Kate Briggs provide the perfect start to Season 4 of Novel Dialogue. Our first themed season is devoted to translation in all its forms: into and out of English and also in, around, and over the borders between criticism and fiction. We talk to working translators, novelists who write in multiple languages, and we even time travel to discover older novels made new again in translation. How perfect then to begin with Kate, whose 2017 This Little Art is filled with translational...2022-09-0859 minNovel Dialogue4.0 Novel Dialogue Season 4: Transitions and TranslationsIntroducing Season 4.0 of Novel Dialogue! Hosts John Plotz and Aarthi Vadde welcome new lead hosts Emily Hyde and Chris Holmes. This will be Novel Dialogue’s first themed season focusing on conversations between translators and novelists. Our hosts offer a sneak peek into a very exciting season.Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2022-09-0111 min
High TheoryRecall This Book CrossoverThis is our first crossover episode! Saronik and Kim talk to John Plotz from the wonderful Recall This Book podcast.Our conversation is rather wide ranging, but we focus on podcasting and the pastoral. Take a look at their page for show notes and transcripts.Some of the books we discuss include Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, by M.K. Gandhi; Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Angel Island by Inez Haynes Gillmore. Our recallable books are Mark Matthew’s Droppers, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last; and Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native.Recall this Bo...2022-05-1947 min
New Books in Literature3.6 Why are you in bed? Why are you drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in ConversationColm Tóibín, the new laureate for Irish fiction, talks to Joseph Rezek of Boston University, and guest host Tara K. Menon of Harvard. The conversation begins with Colm’s latest novel The Magician, about the life of Thomas Mann, and whether we can or should think of novelists as magicians and then moves swiftly from one big question to the next. What are the limitations of the novel as a genre? Would Colm ever be interested in a writing a novel about an openly gay novelist? Why and how does death figure in Colm’s fiction? Each of Colm’s r...2022-04-1446 min
New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies3.6 Why are you in bed? Why are you drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in ConversationColm Tóibín, the new laureate for Irish fiction, talks to Joseph Rezek of Boston University, and guest host Tara K. Menon of Harvard. The conversation begins with Colm’s latest novel The Magician, about the life of Thomas Mann, and whether we can or should think of novelists as magicians and then moves swiftly from one big question to the next. What are the limitations of the novel as a genre? Would Colm ever be interested in a writing a novel about an openly gay novelist? Why and how does death figure in Colm’s fiction? Each of Colm’s r...2022-04-1445 minNovel Dialogue3.6 Why are You in Bed? Why are You Drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in ConversationColm Tóibín, the new laureate for Irish fiction, talks to Joseph Rezek of Boston University, and guest host Tara K. Menon of Harvard. The conversation begins with Colm’s latest novel The Magician, about the life of Thomas Mann, and whether we can or should think of novelists as magicians and then moves swiftly from one big question to the next. What are the limitations of the novel as a genre? Would Colm ever be interested in a writing a novel about an openly gay novelist? Why and how does death figure in Colm’s fiction? Each of Colm’s r...2022-04-1446 minNew Books in LGBTQ+ Studies3.5 The Romance of Recovery: Ben Bateman talks to Shola von Reinhold (AV)Shola von Reinhold is the author of LOTE, a novel about getting lost in the archives and finding what the archives have lost. LOTE won the 2021 James Tait Black prize so who better to join Shola on Novel Dialogue than Ben Bateman of Edinburgh University, lead judge of the prize committee? This conversation takes listeners back to all yesterday’s parties as Shola, Ben, and Aarthi time travel to the Harlem Renaissance and the interwar modernist era. Shola offers up Richard Bruce Nugent as their current figure of fascination (or “transfixion” to use a key image from LOTE), and wonders what...2022-03-3137 minNovel Dialogue3.5 The Romance of Recovery: Ben Bateman talks to Shola von Reinhold (AV)Shola von Reinhold is the author of LOTE, a novel about getting lost in the archives and finding what the archives have lost. LOTE won the 2021 James Tait Black prize so who better to join Shola on Novel Dialogue than Ben Bateman of Edinburgh University, lead judge of the prize committee? This conversation takes listeners back to all yesterday’s parties as Shola, Ben, and Aarthi time travel to the Harlem Renaissance and the interwar modernist era. Shola offers up Richard Bruce Nugent as their current figure of fascination (or “transfixion” to use a key image from LOTE), and wonders what...2022-03-3137 minNew Books in Literature3.5 The Romance of Recovery: Ben Bateman talks to Shola von Reinhold (AV)Shola von Reinhold is the author of LOTE, a novel about getting lost in the archives and finding what the archives have lost. LOTE won the 2021 James Tait Black prize so who better to join Shola on Novel Dialogue than Ben Bateman of Edinburgh University, lead judge of the prize committee? This conversation takes listeners back to all yesterday’s parties as Shola, Ben, and Aarthi time travel to the Harlem Renaissance and the interwar modernist era. Shola offers up Richard Bruce Nugent as their current figure of fascination (or “transfixion” to use a key image from LOTE), and wonders what...2022-03-3137 min
New Books in Science Fiction3.4 The Work of Inhabiting a Role: Charles Yu speaks to Chris Fan (JP)Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). He brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. His other work includes two books of short stories (Third Class Superhero 2006 and Sorry Please Thank You in 2012) and some episodes of Westworld, He speaks with John and with Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine...2022-03-1746 minNew Books in Literature3.4 The Work of Inhabiting a Role: Charles Yu speaks to Chris Fan (JP)Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). He brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. His other work includes two books of short stories (Third Class Superhero 2006 and Sorry Please Thank You in 2012) and some episodes of Westworld, He speaks with John and with Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine...2022-03-1746 minNovel Dialogue3.4 The Work of Inhabiting a Role: Charles Yu speaks to Chris Fan (JP)Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). He brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. His other work includes two books of short stories (Third Class Superhero 2006 and Sorry Please Thank You in 2012) and some episodes of Westworld, He speaks with John and with Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine...2022-03-1746 min
New Books in Asian American Studies3.4 The Work of Inhabiting a Role: Charles Yu speaks to Chris Fan (JP)Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). He brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. His other work includes two books of short stories (Third Class Superhero 2006 and Sorry Please Thank You in 2012) and some episodes of Westworld, He speaks with John and with Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine...2022-03-1746 min
New Books in Art3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatr...2022-03-0341 min
New Books in Japanese Studies3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatr...2022-03-0341 minNovel Dialogue3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatr...2022-03-0341 min
New Books in Film3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatr...2022-03-0341 minNew Books in Literature3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatr...2022-03-0341 minNew Books in Asian American Studies3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatr...2022-03-0341 min
New Books in Buddhist Studies3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatr...2022-03-0341 minNovel Dialogue3.2 Promises Unkept: Damon Galgut with Andrew van der VliesGuest host Chris Holmes sits down with Booker Prize winning novelist Damon Galgut and Andrew van der Vlies, distinguished scholar of South African literature and global modernisms at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Andrew and Damon tunnel down into the structures of Damon’s newest novel, The Promise to locate the ways in which a generational family story reflects broadly on South Africa’s present moment. The two discuss how lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic invoke for some the limitations on movement during the Apartheid era in South Africa. The Promise is a departure from Damon’s previous two novels, which we...2022-02-1747 min
Public Books 101PB 101 presents … Novel Dialogue: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin ChengThis season, Public Books is partnering with Novel Dialogue, a podcast where a novelist and a literary critic talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them.
Originally founded and hosted by Aarthi Vadde and John Plotz, Novel Dialogue is introducing some fresh new voices into the mix. This season, John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman as guest hosts. And they have brought a series of scintillating conversations with them!
In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Cha...2022-02-0438 minNovel Dialogue3.1 On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin ChengSeason three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman into the ND pod as guest hosts. And have they brought a series of scintillating conversations with them! In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Chang-rae Lee and Anne Anlin Cheng, renowned scholar of American literature and visual culture at Princeton.The conversation goes small and goes big: from the shortest short story to the totalizing effects of capitalism. Chang-rae is no strange...2022-02-0337 min
New Books in Historical Fiction3.1 On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin ChengSeason three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman into the ND pod as guest hosts. And have they brought a series of scintillating conversations with them! In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Chang-rae Lee and Anne Anlin Cheng, renowned scholar of American literature and visual culture at Princeton.The conversation goes small and goes big: from the shortest short story to the totalizing effects of capitalism. Chang-rae is no strange...2022-02-0337 minNew Books in Asian American Studies3.1 On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin ChengSeason three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman into the ND pod as guest hosts. And have they brought a series of scintillating conversations with them! In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Chang-rae Lee and Anne Anlin Cheng, renowned scholar of American literature and visual culture at Princeton.The conversation goes small and goes big: from the shortest short story to the totalizing effects of capitalism. Chang-rae is no strange...2022-02-0337 minNew Books in Literature3.1 On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin ChengSeason three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman into the ND pod as guest hosts. And have they brought a series of scintillating conversations with them! In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Chang-rae Lee and Anne Anlin Cheng, renowned scholar of American literature and visual culture at Princeton.The conversation goes small and goes big: from the shortest short story to the totalizing effects of capitalism. Chang-rae is no strange...2022-02-0337 minNovel Dialogue72 Caryl Phillips Speaks with Corina StanOur second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more.It’s a rangy con...2022-01-2049 minNovel Dialogue71 Jennifer Egan with Ivan Kreilkamp: Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal (Novel Dialogue crossover, JP)This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. (If you want to hear more, RtB 53 featured Nobel Orhan Pamuk, RtB 54 brought in Helen Garner, and in RtB 72 we haveCaryl Phillips). Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan--prolific and prize-winning American novelist--than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread.Jennifer Egan © Pieter M. van Hattem2022-01-0637 minNew Books in Asian American Studies2.7 The Novel of Revolutionary Ideas: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colleen LyeViet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer and its sequel The Committed, joins esteemed scholar Colleen Lye of UC-Berkeley for a candid discussion about the Asian-American novel and the role of literature and theory in radical social movements. Colleen is drawn to the mix of philosophy and suspense in Viet's work and wonders if he considers himself a member of the theory generation (those writers for whom literary theory is not just a way of reading texts but an impetus to create new literary forms for grappling with ideas). Viet, schooled in deconstruction and postcolonial theory...2021-12-1646 min
New Books in Politics and Polemics2.7 The Novel of Revolutionary Ideas: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colleen LyeViet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer and its sequel The Committed, joins esteemed scholar Colleen Lye of UC-Berkeley for a candid discussion about the Asian-American novel and the role of literature and theory in radical social movements. Colleen is drawn to the mix of philosophy and suspense in Viet's work and wonders if he considers himself a member of the theory generation (those writers for whom literary theory is not just a way of reading texts but an impetus to create new literary forms for grappling with ideas). Viet, schooled in deconstruction and postcolonial theory...2021-12-1648 minNovel Dialogue2.7 The Novel of Revolutionary Ideas: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colleen LyeViet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer and its sequel The Committed, joins esteemed scholar Colleen Lye of UC-Berkeley for a candid discussion about the Asian-American novel and the role of literature and theory in radical social movements. Colleen is drawn to the mix of philosophy and suspense in Viet's work and wonders if he considers himself a member of the theory generation (those writers for whom literary theory is not just a way of reading texts but an impetus to create new literary forms for grappling with ideas). Viet, schooled in deconstruction and postcolonial theory...2021-12-1648 min
New Books in Latino Studies2.6 Dreaming or Thinking: Cristina Rivera Garza with Kate Marshall and Dominique VargasND stages a trialogue this week with MacArthur "Genius" Cristina Rivera Garza and Notre Dame critics Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas. Professor Rivera Garza recalls roadtripping through Mexico in a bochito (a Volkswagen). For her, such drives became the mother of literary invention: there was no car radio and when family conversations died down, the window (and not an iPhone) became the screen that occupied her. In a more serious vein, CRG, Kate, and Dominique also discuss the role of linguistic mobility and translation in bringing Rivera Garza’s novels and essays to English-speaking audiences. CRG reflects on how books chan...2021-12-0233 min
New Books in Latin American Studies2.6 Dreaming or Thinking: Cristina Rivera Garza with Kate Marshall and Dominique VargasND stages a trialogue this week with MacArthur "Genius" Cristina Rivera Garza and Notre Dame critics Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas. Professor Rivera Garza recalls roadtripping through Mexico in a bochito (a Volkswagen). For her, such drives became the mother of literary invention: there was no car radio and when family conversations died down, the window (and not an iPhone) became the screen that occupied her. In a more serious vein, CRG, Kate, and Dominique also discuss the role of linguistic mobility and translation in bringing Rivera Garza’s novels and essays to English-speaking audiences. CRG reflects on how books chan...2021-12-0233 minNew Books in Literature2.6 Dreaming or Thinking: Cristina Rivera Garza with Kate Marshall and Dominique VargasND stages a trialogue this week with MacArthur "Genius" Cristina Rivera Garza and Notre Dame critics Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas. Professor Rivera Garza recalls roadtripping through Mexico in a bochito (a Volkswagen). For her, such drives became the mother of literary invention: there was no car radio and when family conversations died down, the window (and not an iPhone) became the screen that occupied her. In a more serious vein, CRG, Kate, and Dominique also discuss the role of linguistic mobility and translation in bringing Rivera Garza’s novels and essays to English-speaking audiences. CRG reflects on how books chan...2021-12-0233 minNovel Dialogue2.6 Dreaming or Thinking: Cristina Rivera Garza with Kate Marshall and Dominique VargasND stages a trialogue this week with MacArthur "Genius" Cristina Rivera Garza and Notre Dame critics Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas. Professor Rivera Garza recalls roadtripping through Mexico in a bochito (a Volkswagen). For her, such drives became the mother of literary invention: there was no car radio and when family conversations died down, the window (and not an iPhone) became the screen that occupied her. In a more serious vein, CRG, Kate, and Dominique also discuss the role of linguistic mobility and translation in bringing Rivera Garza’s novels and essays to English-speaking audiences. CRG reflects on how books chan...2021-12-0233 minNovel Dialogue2.5 Stitching the Past to the Present: Caryl Phillips speaks with Corina Stan (JP)Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale, world-renowned and prize-winning novelist (from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset) shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, educated in Romania, Germany, France and the US, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature.It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to America...2021-11-1147 minNovel Dialogue2.4 In Medias Res: Kamila Shamsie and Ankhi Mukherjee (AV)Acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsie joins esteemed Oxford scholar Ankhi Mukherjee for a wide-ranging discussion of literature and politics. Ankhi raises the unique challenges facing postcolonial and specifically Muslim writers in the wake of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, including the pressure to become commentators in times of crisis (our episode was recorded in August as American troops withdrew from Afghanistan). Kamila reserves the right of mental freedom in the face of such expectations. Early in her career, she turned down the opportunity to become a “professional Muslim” and never looked back. Yet, as Ankhi points out, Kamila’s novels from B...2021-10-2845 minNovel Dialogue2.3 Because I Couldn’t Be a Dancer: Sigrid Nunez and Tara Menon (JP)The brilliant New York writer Sigrid Nunez‘s most recent novel is What Are You Going Through; her previous one, The Friend, (2018) won the National Book Award. She speaks with Tara Menon, of the Harvard English department, and author of a terrific article about Sigrid Nunez in the Sewanee Review.The conversation ranges widely and then plunges into depths. Because life is defined by grief and mourning, so too are my novels, says Nunez. She thinks her upbringing with immigrant parents who felt adrift from their homeland and her own “failure” as a dancer (recounted in her 1995 debut...2021-10-1440 minNovel Dialogue2.2 Adaptation: Tom Perrotta and Mark Wollaeger Go from Page to Screen (AV)Novelist, screenwriter, and HBO showrunner Tom Perrotta joins his old friend Mark Wollaeger (who also happens to be a top scholar of modernism) for a wide-ranging conversation about literature, television, and everything in between.Tom reveals that he has been reading a most peculiar self-help book: Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Mark then shares some juicy Joyce anecdotes before getting into the nitty gritty of style and craft. We discuss balancing difficult themes with accessible prose and debate whether a therapeutic model of novel-writing (where characters grow and change) can translate into a therapeutic model of...2021-09-3042 minNovel Dialogue2.1 Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal: Jennifer Egan and Ivan Kreilkamp (JP)We are just delighted to welcome you back to the second season of Novel Dialogue, putting scholars and writers together to chew the fat, and spill secrets of the trade. It begins with a bang; who better to interview the prolific and prize-winning American novelist Jennifer Egan than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread.Their conversation with John ranges widely over Egan’s oeuvre–not to mention 18th and 19th century literature. Trollope, Richardson and Fielding are praised and compared to m...2021-09-1636 minNovel Dialogue1.9 Season Wrap: Aarthi and John Reflect and RuminateOur two hosts play guest, and dive into the season’s high and lowlights, starting with the role humor played on the show. We also talk through the affordances of the “virtual” studio as opposed to the brick and mortar one where John recorded podcasts in “the before time.”Literary critics that we are, we can’t help but consider the podcast as an audio form that solicits different kinds of listening. Aarthi wonders if it’s “close” vs “ambient.” We both reminisce fondly about radio shows, especially Dr. Drew and Adam Corolla on Loveline. While discussing how editing decisions...2021-04-2926 min
Recall This Book54 Crossover Month #3: Novel Dialogue with Helen Garner (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)Crossover Month continues with a scintillating Australian fiction episode from Novel Dialogue, a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher. Helen Garner … Continue reading "54 Crossover Month #3: Novel Dialogue with Helen Garner (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2021-04-2250 minNovel Dialogue1.8 The Novel is like a Stack of Yurts: George Saunders talks with Michael Johnston (AV)Novel Dialogue sits down with Michael Johnston of Purdue University and George Saunders, master of the short story form and author of the Booker-prize winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. This conversation was defiant of novelist and chemist C.P. Snow’s lament that the sciences and humanities have become siloed from one another. George shows us how works of fiction are laboratories for all sorts of experiments. He also explains how his background in the sciences and engineering has shaped his approach to writing fiction. (Hint: it has a lot to do with the search for truth and a...2021-04-2251 minNovel Dialogue1.7 Helen Garner is Hacking at the Adverbs (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency...2021-04-1549 minRecall This Book53 Crossover Month #2: Novel Dialogue (Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Robbins, JP)Crossover Month continues with something completely different, and only a little bit incestuous. Novel Dialogue is a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. John and Aarthi serve as the third wheel (or if you prefer the social lubricant) for a scholar and a novelist who sit down … Continue reading "53 Crossover Month #2: Novel Dialogue (Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Robbins, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2021-04-0840 minNovel Dialogue1.6 Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny: Kameron Hurley with Gerry Canavan (AV)Gerry Canavan talks to geek feminist author Kameron Hurley about her Hugo-nominated novel The Light Brigade. A love-hate letter to military science fiction, The Light Brigade turns the form on its head. It is built around women fighters, queerness, and defying authority while being at the bottom of the chain of command. The novel also has surprising roots in the history of anti-apartheid resistance in South Africa where Kameron lived for a time to research women’s roles in armed revolt. We discuss delayed reveals of characters’ race and gender in sci-fi in light of the genre’s history of Whit...2021-04-0831 minNovel Dialogue1.5 Getting Into Other Worlds: James Robertson with Penny Fielding (JP)James Robertson, brilliant author of The Testament of Gideon Mack, and University of Edinburgh’s top prof. Penny Fielding beam in from their respective corners of Scotland. Extensive reference is made to (John’s madly beloved) James Hogg and to Robert Louis Stevenson, especially his Jack-the-Ripperesque Jekyll and Hyde. The violence that underpins slavery–aye, even in Scotland, and even during the enduringly influential Scottish Enlightenment–is dredged up, as is the question of feeling implicated in the legacy of an enslaving system. James sketches a generous theory about what and how a novel signifies: it is simply asleep until a...2021-04-0140 minNovel Dialogue1.4 Feral Fiction: Catherine Lacey and Martin Puchner (JP)Novel Dialogue sends Martin Puchner (polymathic author of The Written World and most recently The Language of Thieves) out to speak with Pew author Catherine Lacey. They go a-wandering. Lacey’s earlier works include a 2018 collection of short stories, Certain American States, and two novels: The Answers in 2017 and 2014’s Nobody is Ever Missing, a delightful road novel set in New Zealand–always a sure way to win John’s admiration. Martin starts by noticing the feral through-line in Catherine’s work, a way that people escape or withdraw from socialization. And things go rapidly uphill and downhill from there. In sh...2021-03-2530 minNovel Dialogue1.3 Oh, The Places You’ll Go: Madhuri Vijay talks to Ulka Anjaria (AV)Ulka Anjaria and Madhuri Vijay sit down to talk about Madhuri’s prize-winning first novel The Far Field. They discuss what it’s like to write intimately about a place – Kashmir – that many people even within India know only through headlines and news stories. Getting intimate with a place moves us into talking about the Indian novelist as a guide to Indian society. Sometimes guiding readers reflects a legacy of cultural imperialism where writers in the Global South gain prestige and fame from addressing audiences in Europe and the United States. Other times guiding readers enables citizens of India to see r...2021-03-1838 minNovel Dialogue1.2x Bonus: Orhan Pamuk Reads and Glosses the End of SnowPamuk plays scholar and novelist both. He reads the cheekily postmodernist final page of his novel Snow, while also talmudically interspersing comments on the text.Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2021-03-1106 minNovel Dialogue1.2 That Demonic Novelistic Impulse: Orhan Pamuk with Bruce Robbins (JP)In Episode Two of Novel Dialogue, critic and scholar Bruce Robbins sits down with Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. They have taught classes on the political novel together at Columbia for years, and it shows. They ask how the novel can ever escape its roots in middle-class sensibility and perspective: Joseph Conrad comes up, but so does modern Brazilian film. Then they discuss the demonic appeal of Russian novels—and why retired military officers produced so many great Turkish translations of Russian novels.We hear tantalizing details about Pamuk’s forthcoming pandemic novel, Nights of Plague. He discusses his m...2021-03-1139 minNovel Dialogue1.1 Do Great Novels Set the Standard or Challenge it? Kelly Rich and Teju Cole (AV)Novel Dialogue kicks off with the writer and photographer Teju Cole and literary critic Kelly Rich of Harvard University talking about “saying yes to the text” as the first rule of good literary critical reading. But they also consider what happens when the urge to affirm a text gets swept up in the larger social and political dilemmas of our time. How do we celebrate great works of literature and art while also questioning the standards that have historically granted some writers “greatness” and left others out due to race, gender, and national background? In this episode, we look for ways o...2021-03-0449 minNovel Dialogue1.0 Introducing a New Podcast: Novel Dialogue with Aarthi Vadde and John PlotzNovel Dialogue : where unlikely conversation partners come together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. Join Aarthi Vadde, a scholar of contemporary literature and Victorianist John Plotz as they take a four-continent journey (ok, fine a virtual four-continent, Zoomish journey….) to talk turkey with novelists and critics the world over. In fact, episode two takes place in….Turkey, where Orhan Pamuk , in conversation with Bruce Robbins, reveals a hankering for french fries…Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor...2021-03-0304 min