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, explains how the opening letter to his translator Natasha mirrors the letter to his editor, Teresa, in Spanish, and how both letters become partContinue reading “9.6 We Better Laugh About It: Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí”
Tag Archives: #bookpodcast
9.5 Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)
In an essay about her recent book Searches, a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with VauhiniContinue reading “9.5 Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)”
9.4 “That In Between Time:” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)
Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Mugre rosa) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our world into something uncannily similar to the one imagined in the Uruguayan writer’s fourth novel. Here, an environmental disaster that begins as red algae bloom in the oceans has produced aContinue reading “9.4 “That In Between Time:” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)”
9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)
In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established aContinue reading “9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)”
9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper (RB)
What work can genre do today? And can the genre system become more than a method of reductive containment and market segmentation—can it be a generative source of imaginative chaos? Few are as qualified to address these questions as Lauren Beukes, whose simultaneous embrace of genres from science fiction to crime to horror and refusalContinue reading “9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper (RB)”
9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW)
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 wantContinue reading “9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW)”
9.0 Writing Against the System (EH, CH)
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 isContinue reading “9.0 Writing Against the System (EH, CH)”
8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan (RB)
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 lascarContinue reading “8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan (RB)”
8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde (JP)
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 of more than a dozen novels and story collections and recently the nonfictional We Loved it All—also works at the Center for Biological Diversity. Wild creatures gambol, flap, swim, andContinue reading “8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde (JP)”
8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)
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 TheContinue reading “8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)”
8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
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 heardContinue reading “8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)”
8.2 To gallop again and again into failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)
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 forContinue reading “8.2 To gallop again and again into failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)”
8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)
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, capitalismContinue reading “8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)”
7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH)
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, wasContinue reading “7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH)”
7.5 Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)
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 forContinue reading “7.5 Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)”
7.4 Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song (RB)
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 firstContinue reading “7.4 Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song (RB)”
7.3 What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)
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 theContinue reading “7.3 What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)”
7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)
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 aboutContinue reading “7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)”
7.1 Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds (JP)
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 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 spaceContinue reading “7.1 Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds (JP)”
6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
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 unpackContinue reading “6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)”
Novel Dialogue 