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)”
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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)”
Novel Dialogue 