8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan (RB)

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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

Listen and Read:

Audio: “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan (RB)

Transcript: 8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan (RB)

10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) – Novel Dialogue

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
  1. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
  2. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
  3. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)
  4. We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
  5. 9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)
Listen to more episodes

Cover design. Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg, One World, 2018. Front cover.