Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Novel Dialogue

“I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire, history as a whole,” declares the Iraqi novelist, poet, scholar, and literary translator Sinan Antoon near the start of this conversation about his most recent novel, Of Loss and Lavender. Sinan, speaking with Magalí and critic Michael Allan, goes on to say that “the novel allows for a more wholesome, in-depth confrontation with history.” That confrontation, in turn, requires narrative forms that are complex, sometimes fractured, and often non-linear in order to braid together a range of different perspectives on a particular moment or event. As Sinan observes in a discussion of the Arabic term nisyān—“forgetting” or “forgetfulness,” although its nuances in Arabic are not easily rendered in English—even memory itself is not static. And yet, shared histories of empire and imperialism make it possible to draw connections between far-flung locations, as Sinan does in Of Loss and Lavender by drawing together Iraq and Puerto Rico. From here, the conversation turns to the pleasures and challenges of translation, including some of Sinan’s choices when translating his own work into English. This includes the effort to make legible the nuances of race, class, and other forms of difference across contexts; although, as Sinan notes, much of his younger readership in the Arab world today is often well-versed in US culture. The conversation concludes with a discussion of Sinan’s frequent use of poems and songs in the novel, a device that points back to the multi-genre experiments of the premodern Arabic tradition, and a moving portrait of a teacher who transmitted to his students ideas about justice and equality despite the dictatorship under which he worked. Mentioned in this episode: About Baghdad The Baghdad Eucharist Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness” (on nisyān) The Book of Collateral Damage Elias Khoury and the use of dialect in contemporary Arabic fiction Quebecois literature Breaking Bad Um Kulthoum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to write about place is a question that cuts across the career of the South African Ivan Vladislavić. The questions of place and space are pressing ones in the context of South Africa, where the transition to democracy in 1994 included a redrawing of the national map, and the last three decades have seen the large-scale transformation of urban centers such as Johannesburg. What defines Johannesburg a literary city? asks the critic Jeanne-Marie Jackson. From this unfurls a series of reflections about the writer’s relationship to place and the various ways in which narrative form can be bent to capture the experience of place—and in particular the experience of a place as it changes across time. The resulting work may feel fragmentary, Ivan allows, but that is a function of the nature of place rather than an imposition on the part of the writer. Finally, the conversation turns toward Ivan’s choice to study Afrikaans literature in the 1970s. As a tradition often at odds with Afrikaner politics and urgently concerned with the world Ivan himself inhabited, reading the work of Afrikaans writers such as Ingrid Winterbach, Entienne Leroux, André Brink, and Breyten Breytenbach offered a vital counterpoint to Ivan’s training in the English canon. Ivan closes by fondly remembering the teacher who introduced him to the writer’s notebook, a habit that continues to be crucial to his practice today. Mentioned in this episode: The Folly Double Negative The Near North Zoë Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town Georges Pérec Gauteng John Miles, Ampie Coetzee, Ernst Lindenberg, and Taurus Publishers Marlene van Niekerk Nadine Gordimer The Goon Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, Ken and Rose discuss the importance of whimsy and the inextricable relationship between imagination and usefulness. For Ken, whose Dandelion Dynasty makes heroes of engineers instead of wizards or knights, precise machinery and innovative gadgets are born, like novels, of imagination. Ken himself might be best described as a meticulous, dedicated tinkerer—a writer playing with the materials and stories of the past to help us encounter new worlds in the present. So even if trying to explain his craft is “like asking fish how they swim,” Ken jumps in and discusses how he writes at such different lengths (hint: the longer the book, the more elephantine) and what he makes of different genre labels, from fantasy to historical fiction. We also learn why Ken is a fan of Brat Summer and still thinking about the Roman Empire. Mentioned in this episode: Ken Liu, Speaking Bones (2022), The Veiled Throne (2021), The Wall of Storms (2017), The Grace of Kings (2016), The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016) Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (2014) Rose Casey, Jessica Wilkerson, Johanna Winant, “An Open Letter from Faculty at West Virginia University” (2023) Rose Casey, “In Defense of Higher Education” (2024) Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) Homer, The Odyssey Virgil, The Aeneid John Milton, Paradise Lost A.M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950) Brat Summer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We 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 us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 9 of Novel Dialogue and to find out what Aarthi's students say when asked: "What would you never automate even if you could?" Mentions -Jennifer Egan: “Black Box” -Teju Cole: Small Fates, Tremor -Lauren Oyler: Fake Accounts -Stewart Home -Tom McCarthy: Satin Island -Yxta Maya Murray: Art Is Everything -Fred Benenson -Xu Bing: Book from the Ground -Rachel Cusk: Transit Naomi Alderman -R.F. Kuang: Yellowface -Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You -Sheila Heti, “According to Alice” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 bureaucracy and corporate malfeasance. Jordy is joined here by Annie McClanahan, a scholar of contemporary literature and culture who describes herself as an unruly interloper in the 18th century.  Like Jordy’s novel, their conversation limns the 18th and 21st centuries, taking up 18th century historical concerns and the messy early history of the novel alongside other textual and vernacular forms, but also inviting us to rethink resistance and utopian possibility today through the lens of this earlier moment. Jordy and Annie leapfrog across centuries, reading the 17th century ballad “The Powtes Complaint” in relation to extractivism and environmental justice, theorizing the “riotous, anarchic, queer language of the dispossessed” that characterizes Confessions of the Fox as a kind of historically informed cognitive estrangement for the present, and considering the work theory does (and does not) do in literary works and in academic institutions. Mentioned in this Episode Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary Dean Spade Samuel Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon series (Tales of Nevèrÿon, Neveryóna, Flight from Nevèrÿon, Return to Nevèrÿon) Samuel Richardson’s Pamela Sal Nicolazzo Greta LaFleur “The Powtes Complaint,” first printed in William Dugdale’s The history of imbanking and drayning of divers fenns and marshes, both in forein parts and in this kingdom, and of the improvements thereby extracted from records, manuscripts, and other authentick testimonies (1662) Fred Moten Saidiya Hartman Jordy Rosenberg, “Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day” and “The Daddy Dialectic” Amy De’Ath, “Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds,” in After Marx, edited by Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon Aziz Yafi, “Digging Tunnels with Pens” Jasbir Puar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During 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 error?). As thunder cracks overhead, she muses on salvation in an exhausted world and the busy lives of Gambel’s Quail. In her recent novels, Lydia has worked to balance the intensely personal with our more communal aspirations: without gossip, she wonders, how do you avoid polemic and the maudlin? Emily praises Lydia’s humor and asks us to consider how a joke—the earnest set-up followed by a sudden deflation—can reconcile our fears and hopes for the future, the daily here-and-now with the magnificent unknowability of the world. Is it humor, comedy, satire, wit? Lydia is “just trying make myself laugh.” She worries, in her life as well as in her writing, about the BS impulse to pretend everything’s ok inside “this emergency, this critical life support dilemma.” We also learn that Lydia will never write historical fiction, despite having a tantalizing family connection to Mark Twain. Mentions: Lydia Millet, We Loved it All (2024), A Children’s Bible (2020), Mermaids in Paradise (2014), Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005) Center for Biological Diversity Gambel’s quail Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard: the three nuclear scientists who vanish from 1945 only to appear in 2003 in Millet’s novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart Rachel Carson Elizabeth Kolbert Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Oscar Wilde Mark Twain Francis Millet and Archibald Butts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 by discussing the second person, a technique Jamil uses throughout Hajji Hotak. He describes it as the most “dangerous perspective” for a fiction writer to take because it brings readers to the edge of the immersive world fiction is supposed to create. The second person in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, from which Jamil reads, forces readers to grapple with our own complicity in the surveillance of Afghan families in the United States and to consider the paradoxical affection that develops between people on opposing sides of war. From there, Jamil, Kalyan, and Aarthi discuss the relationship between video games as mass media and the novel as literary form. Jamil is a huge fan of Final Fantasy 7 (who isn’t?) and talks about how games like Call of Duty (a game he played more ambivalently) perform a recruitment function for the U.S. army. He rewrites that vision of war in more complex terms in his own story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain." Kalyan reflects on how the category of the post-9/11 writer intersects with the War on Terror, and the three of us consider the symbolic function of 9/11 in contemporary fiction written from inside and outside the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann’s physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos. Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer Italo Calvino,If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau Georges Perec’s most famous experiment is Life: A User’s Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”) Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..) Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola? Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story’s first sentence. Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they? Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene) The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 language: how can we write what we think, when we struggle to know what—or how—we think? This conversation goes deep into the psyche in order to reach far beyond it. Even Kaveh’s deeply personal response to the signature question demonstrates that the places farthest away from us may also be found within. Mentioned in this episode By Kaveh Akbar: Martyr! The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (editor) Calling a Wolf a Wolf Also mentioned: My Uncle Napoleon To the Lighthouse Ars Poetica Ferdowsi The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts The Tempest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 discuss seeing the world from a foreign service perspective, the damage wrought by cultures of individuality, and why more novels aren’t set in Azerbaijan. Lydia talks about how the close reading skills that she gained from an English major provide a way reading the world that is underappreciated by our contemporary culture of utilitarianism. From wet bun hair styles to how we want novels to speak about progressive politics, this wide-ranging conversation wraps up with Lydia’s excellent answer to Season 8’s signature question. Mentions: Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham Oil!, Upton Sinclair Timothy Morton How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 characters can achieve escape velocity against the pull of violence and abuse. We learn that Sarah doesn’t imagine an audience when she writes—instead, writing articulates something felt in the body, something that remains “uncomfortable until it is so articulated.” From the Yankee thrift of book design and the writing of front matter, acknowledgements, and Sarah’s brilliant titles, we move to 70s-era typography and wordplay with the answer to Season 7’s signature question. Mentions: By Sarah Manguso: Very Cold People, 300 Arguments, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, The Two Kinds of Decay and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape in One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in A Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso, and Dave Eggers Hilary Mantel Lord Byron, “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad,” from an 1821 letter published in Volume 8 of Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand. Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Nintendo and hacking Lego sets in Ciskei, a “homeland” under the apartheid government’s Bantustan system, to data mining and novel writing in the global cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg. All the while, technology is never something “we’re resigned to experiencing” and “endorsing” in fiction—it can be a medium of contemplation as well as conquest. Masande and Magalí are also interested in the queer intimacies of young people busy forming their own “micro-tribes.” Especially young people who are reading the global phenomenon that is Stephen King by moonlight, when they might be just a little too young for it. Mentions: Masande Ntshanga, The Reactive, Triangulum, and the short story “Space” Samuel R. Delany, Equinox “Hauntology,” from Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx Ciskei Masande Ntshanga’s essay “Technologies of Conquest” in The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making, and Meaning (Dryad Press, 2024) Stephen King, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger Bonus mention: Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives, an edited volume of short stories, artworks, poems and essays that engage with the tragic destruction of the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town in April 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter (Little Brown and Company, 2025). In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of “Midwestern Weimar” and the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, holding forth as many as six times a week for 60 years, wrote a garrulous, glamorous story of the city. While the increasingly unhinged narrator of his novel investigates the mysterious death of Kupcinet’s daughter in 1963, Peter delves into his own family’s history, anxiously asking “we can’t hurt our dead, can we?” The novel swerves between fact and fiction, including photographs that are both real artifacts from the historical record and staged photos that participate in the fictional world of the novel. Peter laughs off this contradiction, remarking “the closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes.” How to describe such a complicated novel? Sarah offers this gem: “It’s as if Philip Roth were less cancellable and wrote a murder mystery,” a line that results in a poignant conversation about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago in middle of the 20th century and what it means to be a cultural outsider, “just slightly outside of the circle.” Peter brings the conversation to a close with a memory of going to the University of Tish.Mentions: Reverend Hightower appears in William Faulkner’s Light in August Irv “Kup” and Essie Kupcinet were Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet’s parents An Edna O’Brien story appears in Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano Phyllis Diller at the Palmer House Bette Howland’s line about Chicago being “the raw materials for a city” appears in Blue in Chicago Alberto Paniagua Philip Roth Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel’s Floaters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Omar 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, literary criticism doesn’t always get the politics of political fiction right. Their conversation moves from the preoccupation with “literal prophecy” which plagues the reception of speculative fiction in general and climate fiction in particular to the multifaceted appeal of the fantastical in writing migration stories. They discuss Omar’s interest not in extrapolation, but in inversion. And they take up the imaginative challenges posed by climate change: the way it fails to fit zero-sum colonial ideologies; the way it relies upon the continued development of “the muscle of forgetting, the muscle of looking away.” Finally, Omar’s answer to the signature question is a case study in the inversion that characterizes his work: Little Women readers, prepare yourselves! Mentioned in This Episode Paolo Bacigalupi Kim Stanley Robinson Barbara Kingsolver Jenny Offill Richard Powers, The Overstory Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement Barack Obama, “A New Beginning: Remarks by the President at Cairo University, 6-04-09” Stephen Markley, The Deluge Alan Kurdi (photographed by Nilüfer Demir) Mohsin Hamid, Exit West Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 back to their origins. Along the way, Brandon reveals what he has taken away from the Romance genre (“everything”), his conviction that The House of Mirth is the prototypical social media novel, and how he tries to avoid writing characters that are just “three spritzes of a personality standing in a room.” Brandon, Stephanie, and Chris close things out with their answers to the signature question about the first books they loved, and the answers are…revealing. Mentioned in this episode By Brandon Taylor: Real Life Filthy Animals The Late Americans Also mentioned: The House of Mirth The Liberal Imagination Georg Lukács Frederick Jameson Germinal Debbie Macomber Julianne MacLean Johanna Lindsey Liz Carlyle, Beauty Like the Night Beverly Jenkins A is for Apple, W is for Witch Guinness Book of World Records Gremlins: The Novelization of the Film Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. They also discuss the influence of absent men (including Henry James), love triangles, love stories, long books, and titles (hint: someone close to Katie says all her novels could be called Complicity). Stay tuned for Katie’s answer to the signature question, which takes listeners from to the farmlands of Avonlea to the mean streets of Chicago. Mentioned in this episode By Katie Kitamura: Intimacies A Separation Gone to the Forest Japanese for Travelers The Longshot Also mentioned: Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation” Henry James, Portrait of a Lady Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables John Steinbeck, East of Eden Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also gently corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they're "just Irish." Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want--while simultaneously “mortifying them...condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.” Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to the signature question: A. A. Milne’s Now We are Six. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sheila 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 lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why "auto-fiction" strikes her as a "bad category" and "a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally" since "the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience." Sheila’s response to the signature question was both textual and hilarious. A true writer's weirdness! Mentioned in this Episode: By Sheila Heti: Pure Colour How Should a Person Be? Alphabetical Diaries Ticknor We Need a Horse (children's book) The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman) Also mentioned: Oulipo Group Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael George Eliot, Middlemarch Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star) Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy Willa Cather , The Professor's House William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble. 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/adchoices

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 characters, for the planet, and for the process of writing at the center of all her fiction. She discusses an anticipated triptych of novels beginning with Matrix and continuing with The Vaster Wilds that covers 1,000 years of women, religion, and planetary crisis and care. The Vaster Wilds tells a kind of anti-captivity narrative as it follows a servant girl who has escaped from a colonial settlement in 1609. The novel asks what it means to love the wilderness even when it is hostile to human survival. Groff and McGrath explore how the novel offers a cautionary tale about the intertwined ills of colonialism and climate change without shame or condescension. Constantly rearranging “the detritus of the actual world” into stories of faith and love and care, Groff relies on the rituals of daily life to discover the formal architectures of fiction. Mentioned in this episode By Lauren Groff: The Vaster Wilds (2023) Matrix (2021) Florida (2018) Fates and Furies (2015) Arcadia (2011) The Monsters of Templeton (2008) Also mentioned: William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian Magazine article on the Jamestown Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe John Williams, Stoner Kate Marshall, Novels by Aliens  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/adchoices

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 anything survives the death of your body, it’s probably the voice in your head, and the voice in his head speaks in the second person.  Moving from philosophy to the politics of fiction, Professor Sangeeta Ray, author of En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke), prompts Shehan to think about Sri Lankan literature’s rise on the global stage, and Shehan makes the case for fiction standing in for the missing records and histories of the dead, lost, and disappeared in a prolonged time of war. The conversation takes us to the surprise Sri Lankan win in the Cricket World Cup of 1996, the role of queer desire in a novel about war tragedies, and whether any story about the Sri Lankan civil war can be optimistic. We end with a signature question that links Shehan and a previous guest, the Argentinian novelist Mariana Enríquez, in their shared (and spooky) writing inspiration.  Mentions: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children  Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes  Shehan Karunatilaka, The Legend of Pradeep Matthew  Kevin Liu  Ted Chiang  1996 Cricket World Cup  Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient   Romesh Gunesekera  Yasmine Gooneratne  Shyam Selvadurai  A. Sivanandan  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, micro, and nanopatterns that Tom identified in their corpus. Writing through a complex set of Oulipo-like constraints, they checked their own authorial freedom to create a book in which the human hand becomes distant and ghostly – its traces felt in the change of seasons and at the bottoms of oceans yet nowhere seen. Deidre connects Tom’s “literary supercut” (their own term for their practice) to the centuries-old tradition of commonplacing in which ordinary readers would cut and paste favored passages into books that then became archives of personal experience and collective memory. The Nature Book thus finds its place in a countercultural tradition of authorship where recycling takes precedence over invention. Copying, curation, and rearrangement become a novelistic style of “degrowth” in which writers discover that, in lieu of developing new language, they can plumb the depths of our already existing language. The episode ends with a series of surprising answers to the signature question: narratives and databases cross paths with hookups and keepsakes!Mentions:  Kota Ezawa Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Fiction for Dummies Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement Herman Melville, Moby Dick It Narratives – narratives in which protagonists are often manufactured objects (e.g. Adventures of a Corkscrew (1775)) Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith et al. (edited) 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/adchoices

Locus- 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 Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. The conversation probes the way Clark’s work limns “the supernatural and the mundane,” delving into his formative experiences with the everyday presence of ancestors in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, the way he writes deities into mortal stories without flattening free will, and why he is committed to writing stories that talk about nations, politics, and racism, even in worlds where the supernatural is just as present. As the episode wraps up, Clark talks about the process that led to his celebrated 2018 story “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” which consists of nine vignettes imagining the lives of the enslaved people whose teeth Washington used for his dentures. Stay tuned for Clark’s iconic answer to this season’s signature question—a must-listen for anybody who has always suspected there’s something weird lurking beneath the surface of children’s television! Mentioned in this Episode andré carrington’s Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction Them! The Day the Earth Stood Still Boris Karloff Vincent Price Star Trek The Twilight Zone The Bayou Classic Toni Morrison Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time Edward Said’s Orientalism The Battle of Algiers The Maxim gun The George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia Michel-Rolph Trouillot National Museum of African American History and Culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 narrative perspective, and the infinite weirdness of government bureaucracy. Along the way, Alison and Jeff dig into the “Florida man” trope and investigate Jeff’s attempts to outwit Florida zoning to re-wild his backyard with native plants. And if you harbor any suspicions about the temperaments of penguin researchers, you won’t want to miss Jeff’s answer to this season’s signature question. Mentions: China Miéville Clive Barker H.P. Lovecraft -The Case of Charles Dexter Ward Annihilation Dead Astronauts Sunshine State Biodiversity Group Rachel Carson 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/adchoices

Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus. Mentioned in this episode By Billy-Ray Belcourt: A Minor Chorus A History of My Brief Body This Wound is a World Also mentioned: The Summer Day “Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel” Rachel Cusk, The Shakespeare and Company Interview “The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis” “100 Things About Writing a Novel” Mourning Diary Ann Cvetkovich Joshua Whitehead Mourning and Melancholia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We 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 Novel Dialogue and to explore our contemporary state of weird.Mentions: --Sheila Heti, Pure Colour --Roberto Bolaño on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian --Megan Ward, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character --David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind --Kasuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun --Elvia Wilk, Oval --Olga Ravn’s The Employees --Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable --Colson Whitehead, Zone One Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 to these distortions, Aminatta describes developing a “forensic level of honesty” that allowed her to re-encounter Sierra Leone on her own terms. She also learned to look back at those who would look at her. Reversing the gaze extends not only from Africa to Europe but also to the human-animal divide. Aminatta and Nicole reconsider Western stereotypes around African animal cruelty, what it means to portray animal consciousness, and what the treatment of dogs in Sierra Leone and foxes in London tells us about what those societies value. Finally, Aminatta reads from Ancestor Stones and offers a chilling vision of the civil war in Sierra Leone through the dissociated perspective of a character inspired by the women who lived through it. Listeners will feel the “underground rising” in Aminatta’s memorable phrase. Books Mentioned: -Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad -Kazuo Ishiguro -Dr. Gudush Jalloh – veterinarian in Sierra Leone and subject of Forna’s essay “The Last Vet” -Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head -Forna, Happiness -Forna, The Hired Man -Temne – largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone; also the name of one of the official languages of Sierra Leone. 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/adchoices

Booker 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 immortality.  Publishers Weekly called it “A masterpiece of literary horror.” In a wide-ranging conversation, Mariana reflects on being a horror writer in Argentina, a country that obsesses over its traumatic past. Indeed, Mariana’s interest in writing fiction in the horror genre was prompted by hearing her first horror stories, the terrors of torture and disappearances under the Argentine Junta government. The three discuss Mariana’s use of violence, especially when it involves children; the various afterlives of the translations of Mariana’s award-winning fiction; and the arborescence of the novel form. Humor and dry wit cut through these weighty topics to make for a lively conversation with one of Latin America’s most important contemporary writers. Mentions:  Silvina Ocampo Mariana Enriquez,  La Hermana Menor -The Things We Lost in the Fire -The Dirty Kid Ray Bradbury, The October Country José Donoso Juan Carlos Onetti Ernesto Sabato Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Ingmar Bergman, The Hour of the Wolf A Nightmare on Elm Street (film) Titane (film) Pope John Paul II The Oulipo Movement Aleister Crowley Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With 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 stake in particular for the Indigenous writers of genre fiction whose work takes shape at that intersection. Their conversation pokes serious fun at everything from the faltering literary truism that being good at plot is somehow less impressive than being good at characterization to debates over authenticity in Native literature. Horror, as Wurth describes it, offers real and meaningful pleasures, solves the craft problems of over exposition, and opens up powerful questions of identity, politics, and history. Tune in for recommendations for genre writers from the emerging Fifth Wave of Indigenous fiction, reflections on orality and linguistics, and Wurth’s cure for “writer’s depression” instead of writer’s block! Mentions Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio Tattered Cover Book Store Talking Scared Podcast Stanley Hotel Red Power movement and the American Indian Movement Tommy Orange’s There, There Water protectors Idle No More Black Lives Matter Astrophil Press The Writer’s Chronicle Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter Save the Cat! Erika T. Wurth’s “The Fourth Wave” and “The Fourth Wave in Native American Fiction” David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual  Wurth also references and recommends a number of genre writers, from romance to speculative literature to crime fiction to horror and beyond. Check out her picks, including B. L. Blanchard, V. Castro, Kelli Jo Ford, Lev Grossman, Grady Hendrix, Brandon Hobson, Marlon James, Jessica Johns, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, Victor LaValle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Danica Nava, Rebecca Roanhorse, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 with the debut of Silver Surfer: Ghost Light, the timing is right to reflect on the pressures and pleasures of adapting beloved stories for a contemporary audience. Jennings is both teacher and student of comics’ powerful lessons, and lucky for listeners, his course comes with an illustrated syllabus, aka illabus. In the podcast’s first ever episode about graphic novels, Jennings and Cloutier talk comic book history, the power of collaboration, and the importance of long showers. By John Jennings: Black Kirby: In Search of the MotherBoxx Connection, John Jennings and Stacey Robinson (2015) The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, Edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings (2016) Kindred, Octavia Butler, Adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (2018) Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler, Adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (2021) After the Rain, Nnedi Okorafor, Adapted by John Jennings and David Brame (2021) Box of Bones: Book One, Ayize Jama Everett and John Jennings (2021) Silver Surfer: Ghost Light, John Jennings and Valentine De Landro (2023) Also mentioned: Megascope, Curated by John Jennings Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud (1993) Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, Roger Sabin (1996) Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, Hillary L. Chute (2014) Maus, Art Spiegelman (1980-1991; complete version 1996) Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination, The Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture (2015-2016) Barry Lyndon, Dir. Stanley Kubrick (1975) The Silver Surfer: And Who Shall Mourn for Him? Stan Lee, Howard Purcell, et al. (1969) Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, Chris Claremont and Al Milgrom (1984-1985) The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (2011) “Red Dirt Witch,” in How Long ‘til Black Future Month? N.K. Jemisen (2018) To learn more about the comic artists Jennings discusses, including Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Frank Miller, and Charles Schulz, see Jeremy Dauber’s American Comics: A History (2021) and Thierry Smolderen’s The Origins of Comics (2014). 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/adchoices

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 assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy's bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion.... Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."  Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."  Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.  Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")  Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.  Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 it feel like to run smack dab into a memory? How can we be mindful of the fact that words (like “this”) are tiny objects with infinite possibilities? If autofiction annoys you, listen for how the form reinvents the self against dominant class and gender structures. And if your boots have ever touched down in Hot Springs, Arkansas, stay tuned for our signature question and don’t miss this episode! Mentions: Judith Butler Anne Carson Autobiography of Red Bhanu Kapil Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Djuna Barnes Nightwood Freytag’s triangle Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji Amy E. Elkins, “The Weaver’s Handshake” William Carlos Williams Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Susan Sontag Walt Whitman Langston Hughes Lucille Clifton Hot Springs High School The Sugarhill Gang, “Rappers Delight” 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/adchoices

In 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 interest, now there are movements to display author’s and translator’s names together. Ann reads an excerpt in Italian from Primo Levi’s The Truce, followed by her re-translation of the autobiographical story for The Complete Works of Primo Levi. She then offers an extraordinary walk through of her decision-making process by honing in on the difficulty of translating one key word “scomposti.” Listening to Ann delineate and discard choices, we are reminded of Italo Calvino’s assertion (echoed by Ann) that translation is indeed the closest way to read. This season’s signature question on “untranslatables” yields another brilliant meditation on word choice and the paradoxical task of arriving at precise approximations. Plus, Ann and Saskia reveal some of their favorite Italian women writers, several of whom Ann has brought into English for the first time. Mentions: --Elena Ferrante --Jennifer Croft --Primo Levi, The Periodic Table --Primo Levi, The Truce, from The Complete Works of Primo Levi --Stuart Woolf, original translator of Levi, If This is the Man --Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story --Italo Calvino --Marina Jarre, Return to Latvia --Elsa Morante, Arturo’s Island --Emily Wilson, only female translator of The Odyssey --Jenny McPhee --Cesare Garboli 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/adchoices

What 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. Brent and Jean-Baptiste consider McKay’s lasting legacy and ongoing revival in the U.S. and France. Translating McKay into French, they note, is a matter of reckoning with France’s own imperial history. That history, along with McKay’s complex understanding of race both in the U.S. and abroad, is illuminated in this conversation about one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated writers. Be sure to check out this episode’s special bonus material for a dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste! 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/adchoices

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/adchoices

Aaron Gwyn is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynn’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All God’s Children, which won the Oklahoma Book award, and The Cannibal Owl. In his conversation with Sean McCann of Wesleyan (A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government and Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism) and Novel Dialogue’s own John Plotz, we learn that Robert Lemmons is a real historical figure and so is Levi English.One way to grasp Gwyn’s achievement is to consider the contrast between his durably realist work and Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Blood Meridian. Much as Aaron and Sean admire that novel, McCarthy’s characters strike them as monstrous and incredible. How about Charles Portis’s True Grit, asks John? Aaron loves it for its ventriloquizing power, and its truth-loving willingness to weave in unsettling back stories like Rooster Cogburn’s ties to Quantrill’s Rangers, an eerily modern pro-Confederate terrorist paramilitary. In our signature question, we learn why Aaron’s favorite teacher was Robert Hill, Pink-Floyd-loving drummer and perennial inspiration (audio here). Mentioned in the episode: Richard Slotkin’s notion of “the man who knows Indians” comes from Gunfighter Nation Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) Herman Melville, Moby Dick William Faulkner Absalom Absalom Toni Morrison, Beloved Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. John Williams, Stoner (but also Butcher’s Crossing –-which John loves— and Augustus, which did indeed split the National Book Award (not the Pulitzer) in 1973 with John Barth’s Chimera. Larry McMurtry’s hard-to-get-into Lonesome Dove Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 feelings of confinement and limitation prompt a contemplation of what exactly defines freedom. The conversation turns on how the novel does not spare you from having “been victim of a violent book yourself,” and that literature which confronts our shared inhumanity toward prisoners should make you feel uncomfortable. In a series of thoughtful exchanges, the novelist and her translator confront the difficulties of preserving the immersiveness of the novel’s affect while being attuned to the precise choices and sacrifices of drawing out the novel in English. The episode ends with our season’s signature question, and a wonderful example of untranslatable Chilean Spanish from Alia. Mentioned in this episode: Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Hughes (2020) Paradais, Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Hughes (2022) The Hole, José Revueltas, trans. Sophie Hughes and Amanda Hopkinson (1969/2018) El Luto Humano (The Stone Knife), José Revueltas (1990) Jorge Borges Sergio Chejfec Amanda Hopkinson, translator Lecumberri Prison, “The Black Palace” 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/adchoices

Yan 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 translated more than 20 books from Chinese, is also a novelist and a playwright currently based in New York City. This conversation roams from cryptozoology to Confucius, from the market for World Literature to the patriarchal structure of language. Yan reads from the “Sacrificial Beasts” chapter of her novel, and Jeremy envies the brevity and compression of her Chinese before reading his own English translation. Throughout this warmhearted conversation, Yan and Jeremy insist upon particularity: upon the specificity of language, even in translation, and the distinctiveness of identity, even in a globalized world. We learn more about Yan’s decision to write in English, and Jeremy’s cat chimes in with an answer to our signature question about untranslatability! Tune in and keep a look out for Yan’s English-language debut, Elsewhere, a collection of stories, due out in 2023. Mentions: -Yiyun Li -Liu Xiaobo -Jhumpa Lahiri -Confucius -Strange Beasts of China -Tilted Axis Press -State of Emergency -Yu char kway -Wittgenstein 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/adchoices

Boubacar 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 country of Senegal. Asked to describe the difference between writing in French and writing in Wolof, Mr. Diop sums it up memorably: “When I start writing in French, I shut the door; I shut the window…I don’t hear the words I’m writing. When I write in Wolof, I hear every word.” Sarah and Mr. Diop discuss whether translation can be an ally to a Wolof worldview or whether the sounds that Mr. Diop hears through his window will inevitably be lost to readers who encounter his Wolof novels in English or French. Their dialogue suggests that, while Wolof represents a form of linguistic emancipation from the legacy of a French colonial education, there is also discovery and freedom in raising the literary profile of Wolof for an international audience. Mr. Diop’s Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks is the first Wolof novel to be translated into English and an excerpt from his second Wolof novel Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma is available in translation here. In response to our signature question of the season, Mr. Diop proposes that the Wolof word “keroog” is very difficult to translate but not impossible. And it spurs an impromptu comparison to the Spanish word “ahorita,” which like “keroog,” blurs the distinctions between present, past, and future. In an episode about personal and political memory, nothing could be more fitting! Mentioned in this episode: --Toni Morrison --Gabriel Garcia Marquez --Mario Vargas Llosa --Ernesto Sábato --Léopold Sédar Senghor --Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks --Les Petits de la guenon (French Translation of Doomi Golo) --Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma – literally translated as Kocc Barma's Grave (Diop’s second Wolof novel) --Malaanum Lëndëm – Diop’s third Wolof novel --Alice Chaudemanche (French translator of Malaanum Lëndëm) --Pierre Nora – French historian --Marianne Hirsch --“Sites mémoriaux du génocide” – memorial sites of genocide (term used by UNESCO that qualify as heritage sites.) --Rwandan term – “ejo” (similar to keroog) from the language: Kinyarwanda 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/adchoices

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 brainteasers: how do I translate characters speaking French in a German novel? what does it mean that “A translation becomes a translation only when somebody declares it to be one”? In this episode, Alejandro and Megan discuss their working relationship and share both Spanish and English passages from Alejandro’s most recent novel, Chilean Poet. There follows a dazzling discussion of poetry within novels, of struggling to be “reborn” as you learn a second language “as something that no longer goes without saying.” Alejandro proposes that to speak Spanish itself, (except “bestseller Spanish”) is already to pivot between the language as it’s spoken differently in different countries. Finally, the new ND “signature question” engenders a cheerful tirade from Megan that brings the conversation to a delightfully feisty conclusion. 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. Mentioned in the episode --Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel; How to Live Together --Samanta Schweblin --Mariana Enriquez --Lina Meruane --Joseph Conrad --Vladimir Nabakov --Oulipo writers who chose rules to organize their writing: e.g.. Georges Perec wrote a novel without the letter e. --Wordsworth, "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room" --Robert Browning as practitioner of "dramatic monologue" (or "double poem") --Alfred, Lord Tennyson --Elizabeth Barrett Browning --Emily Brontë --Charlotte Brontë --Emily Dickinson --T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" --I. A. Richards --Randall Jarrell ("Gertrude spoke French so badly anyone could understand it.....") 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/adchoices

Introducing 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/adchoices

Colm 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 revealing, often deeply personal answers illuminates how both novels and novelists work. As Thomas Mann wrote of the “grubby business” of writing novels, Colm reminds us of the “day to day dullness of novel writing.” Insight and inspiration only arrive, he warns, after long, hard days of work. Mentioned in this episode: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Henry James The Wings of the Dove(1902), Henry James The Ambassadors (1903), Henry James The Golden Bowl(1904), Henry James The Blackwater Lightship(1999), Colm Tóibín The Master (2004), Colm Tóibín Brooklyn(2009), Colm Tóibín The Testament of Mary(2012), Colm Tóibín Nora Webster(2015), Colm Tóibín The Magician(2021), Colm Tóibín 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/adchoices

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 it would have been like to move through Harlem and London by Nugent’s side. Recovering the stories of black writers and artists is essential to Shola’s literary project. It is also inseparable from restoring queerness to the once hyper-masculine and “muscular” paradigm of modernism. In a stirring discussion of the aesthetic forms and moods of historical recovery, Ben and Shola sink into the “purpleness” of the fin-de-siècle and explore the critical power of black sensuousness. Talk of decadence, ornamentality, and frivolity shapes the latter half of this episode, and Doris Payne, the West Virginian jewel thief, emerges as an exquisitely improbable modernist heroine! Mentioned in this episode: -Richard Bruce Nugent -Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward, Porgy -E.M. Forster -David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue -Saidiya Hartman -Benjamin Kahan, The Book of Minor Perverts -James Joyce, Ulysses -Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case” -Ornamentality via Kant, Hegel, and Adolf Loos -Susan Sontag -Doris Payne – a.k.a “Diamond Doris” -Édouard Glissant 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/adchoices

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, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine, noted SF scholar. The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the "small feelings" that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie's time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is "acute impostor syndrome" and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called "double consciousness." In conclusion, we followed the old ND custom of asking Charlie about treats that sustain him while writing. Later, we reached out with this season's question about what new talent he'd love to acquire miraculously. He had a lightning-fast response: "the ability to stop myself from saying a thing I already know I will regret. I would use this on a daily, if not hourly, basis." Mentioned: Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) W. E. B. Du Bois on "double consciousness" (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903) 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/adchoices

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 pediatric psychiatry ward to the enchanted stacks of the public library. The exigencies of environmental storytelling arch over this conversation. Evans asks Ozeki questions of craft (how to move a story through time, how to bring it to an end) that become questions of practice (how to listen to the objects stories tell, how to declutter your sock drawer). And we learn Ozeki’s theory of closure: her novels always pull together at the end so that readers are free to continue pondering the questions they raise. Mentioned in this episode: Mutant Hunt, directed by Tim Kinkaid (1987) My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki (1998) All Over Creation, Ruth Ozeki (2003) The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki (2021) The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo (2014) 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/adchoices

Guest 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 were peripatetic in their global movement and range. Damon describes the ways in which this novel operates cinematically, as four flashes of a family’s long history, with the disembodied narrator being the one on the move. Damon provocatively divides novels into two traditions: those that provide consolation, and those that can provide true insight on the world but must do so with a cold distance. While he does not call The Promise an allegory, Damon admits to the fun that he has with inside jokes that play with allegorical connections, as long as the reader is in on the joke. Damon directly takes on his choice to leave a pregnant absence in the narrative’s insight into his black characters “sitting at the very heart of the book.” Mentioned in this Episode: The Promise, Damon Galgut (2021) The Good Doctor, Damon Galgut (2004) The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer (1974) No Time Like the Present, Nadine Gordimer (2012) Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Álvaro 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 revisions, and so translation becomes “another life for the book.” From the living book to its contents, Maia asks how You Dreamed of Empires blends the gorgeous and the grotesque, slapstick humor and extreme violence, historical detail and mischievous metafictional departures. Álvaro links his work to Season 9’s theme of TECH by pointing out the novel’s longstanding use as a tool to laugh about the powerful, to tell them that what they’re saying is not true, and to articulate politics through contradiction and humor. After discussing the encounter of Moctezuma and Cortés (or really, of their translators, including a very magical bite of cactus) as the moment that changes everything in history, Álvaro makes a surprising historical swerve in his answer to this season’s signature question. Mentions:Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death, You Dreamed of Empires, Now I SurrenderNahuaNatasha WimmerTeresa Ariño, AnagramaSergio Pitol, Enrique Vila-Matas, Javier Marías, Roberto BolañoMiguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; Laurence Sterne; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s TravelsOctavio Paz saying New Spain was a kingdom in One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, translated by Helen R. Lane.Edward SaidLèse-majestéT. Rex, “Monolith”Gonzalo GuerreroThe Colegio de Santa Cruz de TlatelolcoJosé Emilio PachecoMichel FoucaultMichelangeloSaint Paul, Epistle to the RomansNoam ChomskyTlaxcalas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Season 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 stranger to such shifting scales: his novels sweep through large stretches of time and space, but their attention to detail and meticulous prose makes for an intimate reading experience. Chang-rae’s latest novel, My Year Abroad, fuels a discussion about how we can form meaningful bonds in current conditions (hint: it’s often around a table) and about the specters of other, better worlds that haunt Chang-rae’s fictions. He discusses his relationship to his own work and the benefits of taking an “orbital view” on his writing. Chang-rae also offers a tantalizing glimpse into his current project, a semi-autobiographical novel about Korean-American immigrants in 1970s New York. In response to a brand new signature question for the podcast this season, Chang-rae reveals the talent he wishes he could suddenly have... one that Anne already possesses! Mentioned in this Episode Crazy Rich Asians, Dir. Jon M. Chu (2018) Parasite, Dir. Bong Joon-ho (2019) Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is 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/adchoices

Our 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 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 American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United), reflects on his abiding loyalty to his class and geographic origins and his fondness for the moments of Sunday joy that allow people to endure. John raises Orhan Pamuk’s claim (In Novel Dialogue last season) that the novel is innately middle-class; Caryl says that it’s true that as a form it has always taken time and money to make–and to read. But “vicars and middle class people fall in love, too; they get betrayed and let down…a gamut of emotion that’s as wide as anybody else.” He remains drawn to writers haunted by the past: Eliot, W.G. Sebald, the huge influence of Faulkner trying to stitch the past to the present. Mentioned in the Episode James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charley, The Fire Next Time Richard Wright, Native Son Johnny Pitts, Afropean Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark J. M. Coetzee, “What We like to Forget” (On Caryl Phillips) Graham Greene (e.g Brighton Rock and The Quiet American) wrote in “The Lost Childhood” (1951) that at age 14 ” I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf…From that moment I began to write.” Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom Read a transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.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/adchoices

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 Hattem Their conversation ranges widely over Egan’s oeuvre–not to mention 18th and 19th century literature. Trollope, Richardson and Fielding are praised and compared to modern phenomena like TikTok and gamers streaming (including gamers streaming chess, a very special instance of getting inside someone else’s thought process). The PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad gets special treatment, and tantalizing details from Egan’s forthcoming novel, The Candy House (April, 2022) make an appearance. Egan discusses her authorial impulse towards camouflage, her play with genre’s relationship to specialized lingos and argots–and the way a genre’s norms and structure can function like a “lifeline” and also a “portal.” Mentioned in the Episode Jennifer Egan: Visit from the Goon Squad; Look at Me; Manhattan Beach; The Keep Samuel Richardson: Clarissa; Pamela Henry Fielding, Shamela Herman Melville, Moby Dick Patrick O’Brian (e.g. Master and Commander) Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat Read the transcript here. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.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/adchoices

Viet 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, accepts the designation with a caveat: If he is a novelist of ideas, then he is a novelist of revolutionary ideas. Inspired by Fanon's anticolonialism and Gayatri Spivak's concept of the double bind, Viet's defiantly politicizing aesthetic looks to place the colonial subject, particularly the Vietnamese refugee, at the center of multiple stories of American and French imperialism. Colleen and Viet reflect on the role of academic training in Viet's transformation from Asian-Americanist scholar into Asian-American novelist and discuss the peculiarities of immigrant Asian identity in terms of language. Mother tongues, bilingualism, orphaned language, and adopted language all become metaphors for how Asian-American writers must balance the loss of heritage and weight of expectation with the call to self-invention. Plus, Viet reveals the not-so-wholesome treats that enabled him to complete The Sympathizer! Mentioned in the Episode Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Jean-Paul Sartre Nicholas Dames, "The Theory Generation" Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior John Okada, No-No Boy Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Flashpoints for Asian-American Studies W.E.B. DuBois, Double Consciousness Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Double Bind Ocean Vuong Transcript Available Here: https://noveldialogue.org/transcripts/ 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/adchoices