8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)

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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.

Mentioned in this episode:

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 Scary, 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?
Cézanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene)
The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat

Listen and Read:

Audio: Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)

Transcript: 8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)

11.3 “Thank god for editors”: Imbolo Mbue and Sarah Dimick (RB) – Novel Dialogue

In this episode, novelist Imbolo Mbue and critic Sarah Dimick dive into the literary ecosystem from an author’s perspective. Imbolo recalls her formative experiences in public libraries when she first emigrated from Cameroon to the United States, and how her encounters with American literature, especially Oprah’s Book Club picks, shaped her sense of literary possibility. Imbolo’s first novel, Behold the Dreamers, was itself an Oprah’s Book Club selection. In a conversation that moves across Imbolo’s career, from Behold the Dreamers to How Beautiful We Were to the newly released Every Story Is a Love Story, Imbolo and Sarah probe multiple dimensions of the literary ecosystem. They take up networks of literary production: how Imbolo writes both with and against readers’ expectations and desires; how her reading shapes her writing, particularly the memoirs of forgiveness (or the lack thereof) that informed Every Story Is a Love Story; the editorial pressures against which she has been glad to stand her ground, and the ones that have shaped her work for (in her assessment) the better, including a critical intervention from Random House’s Andy Ward that moved Every Story is a Love Story away from punishment and toward the urgent if unsexy problem of forgiveness. They also address what Sarah suggests is another unity across Imbolo’s fiction, in addition to a formal and thematic interest in aftermath: namely, the energy infrastructures—oil, transit, cars—that allow characters to move forward through the world even as they enact extractive harm. Mentions:Oprah's Book ClubNgũgĩ wa Thiong'oChinua AchebeToni MorrisonJonathan FranzenJunot DíazSalman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted MurderMichelle Obama's BecomingYiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely GrowRoxane Gay, "Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof"Random House's Andy WardVerdi’s AidaArundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
  1. 11.3 “Thank god for editors”: Imbolo Mbue and Sarah Dimick (RB)
  2. 11.2 Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem
  3. 11.1 Indie Presses and the Literary Ecosystem: Meg Reid and Will Evans
  4. 10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
  5. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
Listen to more episodes

Merto, Alex. Cover design. Gretel and the Great War, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. Front cover.