Novelists and Critics: “Inviting a Cow to a Butcher’s Convention”?
Do novelists enjoy talking about their work with scholars?
“Inviting a cow to a butchers’ convention,” Amitav Ghosh called it once. (We’re pretty sure he was joking).
But our experience has been that some novelists love to talk with scholars about the underpinning, ground rules, and history of their form. Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them.
More often than not, critics talk to other critics and novelists talk to other novelists. This podcast breaks out of those professional circles in the belief that literary critics and artists can and should be talking directly to one another. Novel Dialogue aims to bring you those conversations.
We offer lively, fun, and sophisticated dialogues that dissect the art of novel-writing and consider the influence of characters, plots, and stories on how we think about the world.
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Latest from Novel Dialogue:
- 14. That Art LifeAre authors ever as interesting as their books? Usually not. Yet writers today are compelled to promote not just their work but themselves.
- 3.6 Why are you in bed? Why are you drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in conversation (TM)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.Continue reading “3.6 Why are you in bed? Why are you drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in conversation (TM)”
- 13. Inventing an ArchiveOne of the first things marginalized researchers in the humanities discover is that the choices about who and what materials are important enough to include in archives, and how that material will be presented, actively works to nullify non-whiteness and queerness.