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)”
Tag Archives: #noveldialogue
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)”
6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath (SW)
Just days before the release of her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), three-time National Book Award Finalist and The New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff sat down to talk to critic Laura McGrath and host Sarah Wasserman. Although Groff admits that she wants “each subsequent book to destroy the one” that cameContinue reading “6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath (SW)”
6.4 “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”: A Discussion with Shehan Karunatilaka and Sangeeta Ray (CH)
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Norton, 2022), which won the Booker Prize in 2022, is a thriller that begins in the afterlife, an uproarious murder mystery set amid the tragedies of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Its protagonist, a war photographer, has become a ghost with just seven moons to find hisContinue reading “6.4 “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”: A Discussion with Shehan Karunatilaka and Sangeeta Ray (CH)”
6.3 Narrative, Database, Archive: A Discussion with Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch (AV)
12 tables; 300 novels, 1500 pages of nature description: This is how Tom Comitta created The Nature Book, a one-of-a-kind novel cut from 300 years of English literary tradition. It has no human characters, no original writing, and it is astoundingly good! Tom sits down with distinguished Harvard prof, Deidre Lynch and host Aarthi Vadde toContinue reading “6.3 Narrative, Database, Archive: A Discussion with Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch (AV)”
6.2 What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington (RB)
Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard (FSU) for a conversation about the archives, methods, and cosmologies that inform his speculative fiction. Clark’s fiction blends fantasy and horror elements with richly drawn historical worlds that speak to his academic life as a historian. MostContinue reading “6.2 What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington (RB)”
6.1 Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling (CH)
Our season of the weird starts off with a conversation between the writer The New Yorker called “the weird Thoreau”, Jeff VanderMeer, and a scholar of the modernist weird, Alison Sperling (FSU). With ND host Chris Holmes, Jeff and Alison delve into how the ugly politics of Lovecraft’s “old” weird gives rise to the stylistic panoply of theContinue reading “6.1 Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling (CH)”
Season 6: Weirding Out with Kate Marshall
We kick off Season 6 with Kate Marshall, friend of the show and author of the forthcoming book Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century. Hosts and producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Kate about the pulpy literary history of weird tales and learn how in the 21st-century weirdness emerges as both genre andContinue reading “Season 6: Weirding Out with Kate Marshall”
5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto (AV)
Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Aminatta is deeply aware of the power to look, to define, and to control the narrative. Although she accepts the moniker of “African writer,” she sees it asContinue reading “5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto (AV)”
5.5 They’re Not Metaphorical Demons: Mariana Enriquez and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (CH)
Booker Prize shortlister Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, joins Penn State professor Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra and host Chris Holmes to talk about her most recent novel, Our Share of Night, her first to be translated into English. Our Share of Night follows a spiritualContinue reading “5.5 They’re Not Metaphorical Demons: Mariana Enriquez and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (CH)”
5.4 The Meat and Bones of Life: Erika T. Wurth with Leif Sorensen (RE)
With the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse, Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earlier fiction and ventures into horror. White Horse follows Kari, an urban Native living in Denver, as a family heirloom belonging to her long-missing mother launches her into a world of the uncanny: ghosts andContinue reading “5.4 The Meat and Bones of Life: Erika T. Wurth with Leif Sorensen (RE)”
5.3 It’s on The Illabus: A Discussion with Jean-Christophe Cloutier and John Jennings (SW)
John Jennings—Hugo Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, curator, scholar, and Artist—is keenly aware that in adapting novels for the graphic format, his decisions turn what has only been imagined into facts drawn on the page. In this conversation with critic, translator, and teacher of a creative course on the art of making comics,Continue reading “5.3 It’s on The Illabus: A Discussion with Jean-Christophe Cloutier and John Jennings (SW)”
5.2 Writing the Counter-book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)
Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended thatContinue reading “5.2 Writing the Counter-book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)”
5.1 We Have This-ness, Y’all! Ocean Vuong and Amy E. Elkins (EH)
Season 5 of Novel Dialogue opens with an impassioned refresher course in literary theory brought to you by Ocean Vuong, poet and author of the bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Ocean talks with critic Amy E. Elkins and host Emily Hyde about browsing bookstore shelves and building his personal reading list ofContinue reading “5.1 We Have This-ness, Y’all! Ocean Vuong and Amy E. Elkins (EH)”
4.6 Translation is the closest way to read: Ann Goldstein and Saskia Ziolkowski (AV)
In our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of translation. Ann speaks to Duke scholar Saskia Ziolkowski and host Aarthi Vadde about being the face of the Ferrante novels, and the curious void that she came to fill in the publicContinue reading “4.6 Translation is the closest way to read: Ann Goldstein and Saskia Ziolkowski (AV)”
Novel Dialogue 