Novel Dialogue: where unlikely conversation partners come together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. What makes us special? Critics and novelists in conversation. Breaking down the boundaries between critical, creative, and just plain quirky, Novel Dialogue’s approach is wide-ranging and unconventional. Ever wondered what Jennifer Egan thinks of TikTok, how Ruth Ozeki honed her craft working on the movie Mutant Hunt, or if Colm Tóibín will ever write a novel about an openly gay novelist? Join us for lively conversations hosted by scholars who admire and write about the novelists that help shape our literary culture. Learn more about Novel Dialogue here.
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10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
Thursday, May 21, 2026 • Duration 46:44
“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
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10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
Thursday, May 7, 2026 • Duration 42:40
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
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9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW)
Episode 59
Thursday, March 27, 2025 • Duration 46:25
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
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9 Trailer Writing Against the System
Episode 58
Friday, March 21, 2025 • Duration 34:10
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”
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8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”
Episode 55
Thursday, December 19, 2024 • Duration 50:16
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
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8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde
Episode 56
Thursday, December 5, 2024 • Duration 51:24
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
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8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)
Episode 55
Thursday, November 21, 2024 • Duration 42:25
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.
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8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
Episode 54
Thursday, November 7, 2024 • Duration 29:20
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
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8.2 To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)
Episode 53
Friday, October 25, 2024 • Duration 46:11
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
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8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)
Episode 52
Thursday, October 10, 2024 • Duration 46:18
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
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