Novel Dialogue: Recent Episodes
Novel Dialogue
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)
https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBN4029263404Listen to more episodesCover design. Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg, One World, 2018. Front cover.
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, and crawl their way through her writing and her conversation: we begin in the Garden of Eden but quickly learn that for Lydia human exceptionalism is the original sin, one that continues to bedevil us in “the nuclear era” (or did she say error?). As thunder cracks overhead, she muses on salvation in an exhausted world and the busy lives of Gambel’s Quail. In her recent novels, Lydia has worked to balance the intensely personal with our more communal aspirations: without gossip, she wonders, how do you avoid polemic and the maudlin? Emily praises Lydia’s humor and asks us to consider how a joke—the earnest set-up followed by a sudden deflation—can reconcile our fears and hopes for the future, the daily here-and-now with the magnificent unknowability of the world. Is it humor, comedy, satire, wit? Lydia is “just trying make myself laugh.” She worries, in her life as well as in her writing, about the BS impulse to pretend everything’s ok inside “this emergency, this critical life support dilemma.” We also learn that Lydia will never write historical fiction, despite having a tantalizing family connection to Mark Twain.
Mentioned in this episode:
Lydia Millet, We Loved it All (2024), A Children’s Bible (2020), Mermaids in Paradise (2014), Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005)
Center for Biological Diversity
Gambel’s Quail
Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard: the three nuclear scientists who vanish from 1945 only to appear in 2003 in Millet’s novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Rachel Carson
Elizabeth Kolbert
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
Oscar Wilde
Mark Twain
Francis Millet and Archibald Butts
Listen and Read:
Audio: And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde (JP)
Transcript: 8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde (JP)
https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBN4029263404Listen to more episodesCover design. We Loved It All, Lydia Millet, W. W. Norton & Company, 2024. Front cover.
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 The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which was a finalist for The National Book Award. Jamil joins Northwestern prof. Kalyan Nadiminti and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about narrative form and the cycles of war. We begin by discussing the second person, a technique Jamil uses throughout Hajji Hotak. He describes it as the most “dangerous perspective” for a fiction writer to take because it brings readers to the edge of the immersive world fiction is supposed to create. The second person in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, from which Jamil reads, forces readers to grapple with our own complicity in the surveillance of Afghan families in the United States and to consider the paradoxical affection that develops between people on opposing sides of war. From there, Jamil, Kalyan, and Aarthi discuss the relationship between video games as mass media and the novel as literary form. Jamil is a huge fan of Final Fantasy VII (who isn’t?) and talks about how games like Call of Duty (a game he played more ambivalently) perform a recruitment function for the U.S. army. He rewrites that vision of war in more complex terms in his own story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.” Kalyan reflects on how the category of the post-9/11 writer intersects with the War on Terror, and the three of us consider the symbolic function of 9/11 in contemporary fiction written from inside and outside the United States.
Mentioned in this episode:
John Barth
Khaled Hosseini
Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
Judith Butler, Frames of War
Call of Duty
Final Fantasy VII
Inaam Kachachi, The American Granddaughter
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Listen and Read:
Audio: All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)
Transcript: 8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)
https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBN4029263404Listen to more episodesCavanaugh, Meighan. Cover design. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, Jamil Jan Kochai, Viking Press, 2022. Front cover.
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. Dallowayoffers 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)
https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBN4029263404Listen to more episodesMerto, Alex. Cover design. Gretel and the Great War, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. Front cover.
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 for expressing its contradictions. Together they explore which forms might best capture the ambivalence and polyphony of the human mind, the contours of Iranian American identity, and the spiritual beauty of everyday existence. Whether discussing neurolinguistics or the affordances of poetry, Kaveh contemplates the limits of language: how can we write what we think, when we struggle to know what—or how—we think? This conversation goes deep into the psyche in order to reach far beyond it. Even Kaveh’s deeply personal response to the signature question demonstrates that the places farthest away from us may also be found within.
Mentioned in this episode:
**By Kaveh Akbar:
Martyr!
The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (editor)
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
Also mentioned:
My Uncle Napoleon
To the Lighthouse
Ars Poetica
Ferdowsi
The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
The Tempest**
Listen and Read:
Audio: To gallop again and again into failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)
Transcript: 8.2 To gallop again and again into failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)
https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBN4029263404Listen to more episodesHuang, Linda. Cover design. Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar, Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. Front cover.
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, capitalism and the yearning for things, optimization and wellness culture, and so much more. Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree. Her second novel, Mobility, is the first book in a new imprint with Crooked Media. Lydia and Megan discuss seeing the world from a foreign service perspective, the damage wrought by cultures of individuality, and why more novels aren’t set in Azerbaijan. Lydia talks about how the close reading skills that she gained from an English major provide a way of reading the world that is underappreciated by our contemporary culture of utilitarianism. From wet bun hair styles to how we want novels to speak about progressive politics, this wide-ranging conversation wraps up with Lydia’s excellent answer to Season 8’s signature question.
Mentioned in this episode:
Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Oil!, Upton Sinclair
Namwali Serpell
Timothy Morton
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm*
Mineral Rites, Bob Johnson*
Listen and Read:
Audio: Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)
Transcript: 8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)
https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBN4029263404Listen to more episodesGaffney, Evan. Cover design. Mobility, Lydia Kiesling, Crooked Media Reads, 2023. Front cover.
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 about the darker corners of the human psyche and the inescapable contours of history that shape her fiction. Alexander and Katie explore how she brings these tensions to “the space of interpretation, where the book exists” and places trust in her readers to dwell there thoughtfully. They also discuss the influence of absent men (including Henry James), love triangles, love stories, long books, and titles (hint: someone close to Katie says all her novels could be called Complicity). Stay tuned for Katie’s answer to the signature question, which takes listeners from to the farmlands of Avonlea to the mean streets of Chicago.
Mentioned in this Episode:
By Katie Kitamura:
Intimacies
A Separation
Gone to the Forest
Japanese for Travelers
The Longshot
Also mentioned:
Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels
Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
Listen and Read:
Audio: You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)
Transcript: 7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)
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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 space of exposure or of authority, but that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.”
Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also gently corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they’re “just Irish.” Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want–while simultaneously “mortifying them…condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.”
Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to the signature question: A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six.
Mentioned in this Episode:
By Anne Enright:
The Gathering (2007; Booker Prize)
The Forgotten Waltz (2011)
The Green Road (2015)
The Portable Virgin
Taking Pictures
Yesterday’s Weather
Granta Book of the Irish Short Story
Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood
No Authority
Also mentioned:
Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking about This
Sally Rooney on the social life of the young on the internet, e.g. Conversations with Friends
Christopher Hitchens, “Booze and Fags:”
Listen and Read:
Audio: Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds
Transcript: 7.1 Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds
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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 unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.”
Sheila’s response to the signature question was both textual and hilarious. A true writer’s weirdness!
Mentioned in this Episode:
By Sheila Heti:
Pure Colour
How Should a Person Be?
Alphabetical Diaries
Ticknor
We Need a Horse (children’s book)
The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman)
Also mentioned:
Oulipo Group
Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard
Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star)
Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy
Willa Cather , The Professor’s House ( overlap of reality and recollection: “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”)
William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble.
Listen and Read:
Audio: Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
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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 came before, writing is always for her an endeavor of focus, ritual, and most of all, love. Whether they retell foundational myths about the nation, as in The Vaster Wilds, or rethink the relationship between faith, nature, and desire, as does Matrix, Groff puts love for her characters, for the planet, and for the process of writing at the center of all her fiction. She discusses an anticipated triptych of novels beginning with Matrix and continuing with The Vaster Wilds that covers 1,000 years of women, religion, and planetary crisis and care. The Vaster Wilds tells a kind of anti-captivity narrative as it follows a servant girl who has escaped from a colonial settlement in 1609. The novel asks what it means to love the wilderness even when it is hostile to human survival. Groff and McGrath explore how the novel offers a cautionary tale about the intertwined ills of colonialism and climate change without shame or condescension. Constantly rearranging “the detritus of the actual world” into stories of faith and love and care, Groff relies on the rituals of daily life to discover the formal architectures of fiction.
Mentioned in this Episode:
By Lauren Groff:
The Vaster Wilds (2023)
Matrix (2021)
Florida (2018)
Fates and Furies (2015)
Arcadia (2011)
The Monsters of Templeton (2008)
Also mentioned:
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian Magazine article on the Jamestown
Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
John Williams, Stoner
Kate Marshall, Novels by Aliens
Listen and Read:
Audio: Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath
Transcript: 6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath
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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 his killer and give his life’s work meaning. This is a historical novel that bends and twists genre and narrative into wondrous and disorienting knots and makes space for the cacophony of ghostly voices of those killed and disappeared in Sri Lanka. Shehan notes that if anything survives the death of your body, it’s probably the voice in your head, and the voice in his head speaks in the second person.
Moving from philosophy to the politics of fiction, Professor Sangeeta Ray, author of En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke), prompts Shehan to think about Sri Lankan literature’s rise on the global stage, and Shehan makes the case for fiction standing in for the missing records and histories of the dead, lost, and disappeared in a prolonged time of war. The conversation takes us to the surprise Sri Lankan win in the Cricket World Cup of 1996, the role of queer desire in a novel about war tragedies, and whether any story about the Sri Lankan civil war can be optimistic. We end with a signature question that links Shehan and a previous guest, the Argentinian novelist Mariana Enríquez, in their shared (and spooky) writing inspiration.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Shehan Karunatilaka, The Legend of Pradeep Matthew
Kevin Liu
Ted Chiang
1996 Cricket World Cup
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Romesh Gunesekera
Yasmine Gooneratne
Shyam Selvadurai
A. Sivanandan
Listen and Read:
Audio: “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”
Transcript: 6.4 “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”
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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 and mood. The conversation roves from the weirdness of the weather to novels that long for the nonhuman and reach for alien perspectives to the genres responding to our climate crisis. Join us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 6 of Novel Dialogue and to explore our contemporary state of weird.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Sheila Heti, Pure Colour
Roberto Bolaño on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
Megan Ward, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character
David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind
Kasuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Elvia Wilk, Oval
Olga Ravn’s The Employees
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Colson Whitehead, Zone One
Listen and Read:
Audio: Weirding Out with Kate Marshall
Transcript: 6.0 Weirding Out with Kate Marshall
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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. Born in Sierra Leone, Aminatta is of Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity and, though she accepts the moniker of “African writer,” she rejects the double-standard of authenticity it implies. She also chafes against the Conradian image of Africa, which infused so many of her own literary encounters with her home continent. In response to these distortions, Aminatta describes developing a “forensic level of honesty” that allowed her to re-encounter Sierra Leone on her own terms. She also learned to look back at those who would look at her. Reversing the gaze extends not only from Africa to Europe but also to the human-animal divide. Aminatta and Nicole reconsider Western stereotypes around African animal cruelty, what it means to portray animal consciousness, and what the treatment of dogs in Sierra Leone and foxes in London tells us about what those societies value. Finally, Aminatta reads from Ancestor Stones and offers a chilling vision of the civil war in Sierra Leone through the dissociated perspective of a character inspired by the women who lived through it. Listeners will feel the “underground rising” in Aminatta’s memorable phrase. Books Mentioned: -Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad -Kazuo Ishiguro -Dr. Gudush Jalloh – veterinarian in Sierra Leone and subject of Forna’s essay “The Last Vet” -Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head -Forna, Happiness -Forna, The Hired Man -Temne – largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone; also the name of one of the official languages of Sierra Leone. Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them?
Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel.
With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion….
.
Mentioned in this episode:
Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze’ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): “We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us.“
Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere “Every book must contain its counter-book.”
Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.
Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom’s 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt.
“Shoah Religion” is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban’s famous quip “There’s no business like Shoah business“)
Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.
Leon Feuchtwanger
“”There’s hope but not for us” Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka’s that Walter Benjamin (in „Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod (“Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.”)
Yitzhak La’or “you ever want a poem to become real”
Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss.
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer
Listen and read:
Audio: Writing the Counter-book
Transcript: 5.2 Writing the Counter-book
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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 of “life-giving weirdos.” They discuss genre and gender, antiquing and thrifting, fish sauce and photography, all the while integrating the insights of queer theory and the full range of literary history. What does looking at the world as a junkyard have to do with making art? What does it feel like to run smack dab into a memory? How can we be mindful of the fact that words (like “this”) are tiny objects with infinite possibilities? If autofiction annoys you, listen for how the form reinvents the self against dominant class and gender structures. And if your boots have ever touched down in Hot Springs, Arkansas, stay tuned for our signature question and don’t miss this episode!
Image credit: Amy E. Elkins, “Ocean’s Boots” (2023)
Mentioned in this episode:
Judith Butler
Anne Carson Autobiography of Red
Bhanu Kapil
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Djuna Barnes Nightwood
Freytag’s triangle
Flaubert’s flâneur
Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Amy E. Elkins, “The Weaver’s Handshake”
William Carlos Williams
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Susan Sontag
Walt Whitman
Langston Hughes
Lucille Clifton
Hot Springs High School
The Sugarhill Gang, “Rappers Delight”
Duchamp’s ready-mades
Listen and Read:
Audio: We Have This-ness, Y’all
Transcript: 5.1 We Have This-ness, Y’all
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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)"
A dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste. And don’t miss him in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards! Listen and read: Transcript: 4.5A Bonus Reading
What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-rangingContinue reading "4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay (SW)"
In this bonus episode, Jean-Baptiste Naudy Reads from Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (English and French). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation into French of McKay’s 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth, which paints a satirical portrait of efforts by 1930s Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. Brent and Jean-Baptiste consider McKay’s lasting legacy and ongoing revival in the U.S. and France. Translating McKay into French, they note, is a matter of reckoning with France’s own imperial history. That history, along with McKay’s complex understanding of race both in the U.S. and abroad, is illuminated in this conversation about one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated writers. Be sure to check out this episode’s special bonus material for a dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste! Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alia Trabucco Zerán, award-winning author of The Remainder (La Resta), and Women Who Kill (Las Homicidas), and Sophie Hughes, Alia’s translator and finalist for the International Booker Prize talk with Novel Dialogue host Chris Holmes about a novel that has shaped their lives as writers and thinkers: The Hole by José Revueltas. Sophie and Alia discuss how The Hole, written while Revueltas was held in the infamous Lecumberri prison, purposefully makes readers feel lost in a small, confined space. Reading a section from her co-translation of The Hole, published in 1969 as El Apando, Sophie considers how the novel’s intense feelings of confinement and limitation prompt a contemplation of what exactly defines freedom. The conversation turns on how the novel does not spare you from having “been victim of a violent book yourself,” and that literature which confronts our shared inhumanity toward prisoners should make you feel uncomfortable. In a series of thoughtful exchanges, the novelist and her translator confront the difficulties of preserving the immersiveness of the novel’s affect while being attuned to the precise choices and sacrifices of drawing out the novel in English. The episode ends with our season’s signature question, and a wonderful example of untranslatable Chilean Spanish from Alia. Mentioned in this episode:
Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Hughes (2020)
Paradais, Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Hughes (2022)
The Hole, José Revueltas, trans. Sophie Hughes and Amanda Hopkinson (1969/2018)
El Luto Humano (The Stone Knife), José Revueltas (1990)
Jorge Borges
Sergio Chejfec
Amanda Hopkinson, translator
Lecumberri Prison, “The Black Palace”
Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang are both writers who accumulate languages. Sitting down with host Emily Hyde, they discuss their work in and across Chinese and English, but you’ll also hear them on Sichuanese, the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Yan Ge’s native Sichuan province, and on the Queen’s English as it operates in Singapore, where Jeremy grew up. Yan is an acclaimed writer in China, where she began publishing at age 17. She now lives in the UK. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out in English in 2020, in Jeremy’s translation. Jeremy, in addition to having translated more than 20 books from Chinese, is also a novelist and a playwright currently based in New York City. This conversation roams from cryptozoology to Confucius, from the market for World Literature to the patriarchal structure of language. Yan reads from the “Sacrificial Beasts” chapter of her novel, and Jeremy envies the brevity and compression of her Chinese before reading his own English translation. Throughout this warmhearted conversation, Yan and Jeremy insist upon particularity: upon the specificity of language, even in translation, and the distinctiveness of identity, even in a globalized world. We learn more about Yan’s decision to write in English, and Jeremy’s cat chimes in with an answer to our signature question about untranslatability! Tune in and keep a look out for Yan’s English-language debut, Elsewhere, a collection of stories, due out in 2023. Mentions: -Yiyun Li -Liu Xiaobo -Jhumpa Lahiri -Confucius -Strange Beasts of China -Tilted Axis Press -State of Emergency -Yu char kway -Wittgenstein Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Boubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, an unforgettable novel of the Rwandan genocide that blends journalistic research with finely drawn characterizations of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. In this episode, Mr. Diop reads from Murambi, translated from French by Fiona McLaughlin, and speaks to Duke professor Sarah Quesada and host Aarthi Vadde about how his workContinue reading "4.2 Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah Quesada (AV)"
Boubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, (Indiana UP, 2016; translated by Fiona McLaughlin), an unforgettable novel of the Rwandan genocide that blends journalistic research with finely drawn characterizations of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. In this episode, Mr. Diop reads from Murambi, translated from French by Fiona McLaughlin, and speaks to Duke professor Sarah Quesada and host Aarthi Vadde about how his work on the novel spurred him to rethink his language of composition. Mr. Diop wrote his first five novels in French, but after Murambi, shifted to Wolof, the most widely spoken language in his home country of Senegal. Asked to describe the difference between writing in French and writing in Wolof, Mr. Diop sums it up memorably: “When I start writing in French, I shut the door; I shut the window…I don’t hear the words I’m writing. When I write in Wolof, I hear every word.” Sarah and Mr. Diop discuss whether translation can be an ally to a Wolof worldview or whether the sounds that Mr. Diop hears through his window will inevitably be lost to readers who encounter his Wolof novels in English or French. Their dialogue suggests that, while Wolof represents a form of linguistic emancipation from the legacy of a French colonial education, there is also discovery and freedom in raising the literary profile of Wolof for an international audience. Mr. Diop’s Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks is the first Wolof novel to be translated into English and an excerpt from his second Wolof novel Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma is available in translation here. In response to our signature question of the season, Mr. Diop proposes that the Wolof word “keroog” is very difficult to translate but not impossible. And it spurs an impromptu comparison to the Spanish word “ahorita,” which like “keroog,” blurs the distinctions between present, past, and future. In an episode about personal and political memory, nothing could be more fitting! Mentioned in this episode: --Toni Morrison --Gabriel Garcia Marquez --Mario Vargas Llosa --Ernesto Sábato --Léopold Sédar Senghor --Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks --Les Petits de la guenon (French Translation of Doomi Golo) --Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma – literally translated as Kocc Barma's Grave (Diop’s second Wolof novel) --Malaanum Lëndëm – Diop’s third Wolof novel --Alice Chaudemanche (French translator of Malaanum Lëndëm) --Pierre Nora – French historian --Marianne Hirsch --“Sites mémoriaux du génocide” – memorial sites of genocide (term used by UNESCO that qualify as heritage sites.) --Rwandan term – “ejo” (similar to keroog) from the language: Kinyarwanda Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A novelist, a translator and a theorist of translation walk into a Zoom Room......Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell, and Kate Briggs provide the perfect start to Season 4 of Novel Dialogue. Our first themed season is devoted to translation in all its forms: into and out of English and also in, around, and over the borders between criticism and fiction. We talk to working translators, novelists who write in multiple languages, and we even time travel to discover older novels made new again in translation. How perfect then to begin with Kate, whose 2017 This Little Art is filled with translational brainteasers: how do I translate characters speaking French in a German novel? what does it mean that “A translation becomes a translation only when somebody declares it to be one”? In this episode, Alejandro and Megan discuss their working relationship and share both Spanish and English passages from Alejandro’s most recent novel, Chilean Poet. There follows a dazzling discussion of poetry within novels, of struggling to be “reborn” as you learn a second language “as something that no longer goes without saying.” Alejandro proposes that to speak Spanish itself, (except “bestseller Spanish”) is already to pivot between the language as it’s spoken differently in different countries. Finally, the new ND “signature question” engenders a cheerful tirade from Megan that brings the conversation to a delightfully feisty conclusion. Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Mentioned in the episode
--Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel; How to Live Together
--Samanta Schweblin
--Mariana Enriquez
--Lina Meruane
--Joseph Conrad
--Vladimir Nabakov
--Oulipo writers who chose rules to organize their writing: e.g.. Georges Perec wrote a novel without the letter e.
--Wordsworth, "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room"
--Robert Browning as practitioner of "dramatic monologue" (or "double poem")
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning
--Emily Brontë
--Charlotte Brontë
--Emily Dickinson
--T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"
--I. A. Richards
--Randall Jarrell ("Gertrude spoke French so badly anyone could understand it.....")
Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A preview of Season 4 of Novel Dialogue, coming to you with new hosts and a new focus on translation! Don’t miss an episode: follow us on Twitter for all the latest episodes dropping on Thursdays in Fall 2022. Listen and Read: Audio: Season 4: Transition and Translation Transcript: 4.0 Transition and Translation
Are authors ever as interesting as their books? Usually not. Yet writers today are compelled to promote not just their work but themselves.
Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). He brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. His other work includes two books of short stories (Third Class Superhero 2006 and Sorry Please Thank You in 2012) and some episodes of Westworld, He speaks with John and with Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine, noted SF scholar.
The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the “small feelings” that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie’s time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is “acute impostor syndrome” and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called “double consciousness.”
In conclusion, we followed the old ND custom of asking Charlie about treats that sustain him while writing. Later, we reached out with this season’s question about what new talent he’d love to acquire miraculously. He had a lightning-fast response: “the ability to stop myself from saying a thing I already know I will regret. I would use this on a daily, if not hourly, basis.”
Mentioned in this Episode:
Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
W. E. B. Du Bois on “double consciousness” (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Listen and Read:
Audio: The Work of Inhabiting a Role
Transcript: 3.4 The Work of Inhabiting a Role
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Putuma and Galgut explore the persistent negation of Black subjectivity and how this negation continues to haunt South African public life. What happens when laws change but hearts don’t?
"Food is about being human." There is an undeniable link between food and mood, but isn't it odd for a literary critic to take an interest in culinary matters?
Season three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman into the ND pod as guest hosts. And have they brought a series of scintillating conversations with them! In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Chang-rae Lee and Anne Anlin Cheng, renowned scholar of American literature and visual culture at Princeton.
The conversation goes small and goes big: from the shortest short story to the totalizing effects of capitalism. Chang-rae is no stranger to such shifting scales: his novels sweep through large stretches of time and space, but their attention to detail and meticulous prose makes for an intimate reading experience. Chang-rae’s latest novel, My Year Abroad, fuels a discussion about how we can form meaningful bonds in current conditions (hint: it’s often around a table) and about the specters of other, better worlds that haunt Chang-rae’s fictions. He discusses his relationship to his own work and the benefits of taking an “orbital view” on his writing. Chang-rae also offers a tantalizing glimpse into his current project, a semi-autobiographical novel about Korean-American immigrants in 1970s New York. In response to a brand new signature question for the podcast this season, Chang-rae reveals the talent he wishes he could suddenly have… one that Anne already possesses!
Mentioned in this Episode
- Crazy Rich Asians, Dir. Jon M. Chu (2018)
- Parasite, Dir. Bong Joon-ho (2019)
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is
Listen and Read
Audio: On Becoming Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin Cheng
Transcript: 3.1 On Becoming Unmoored
https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NBN4029263404 Image credit: Anne Anlin Cheng, Roots
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer and its sequel The Committed, joins esteemed scholar Colleen Lye of UC-Berkeley for a candid discussion about the Asian-American novel and the role of literature and theory in radical social movements. Colleen is drawn to the mix of philosophy and suspense in Viet’s workContinue reading "2.7 The Novel of Revolutionary Ideas: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colleen Lye (AV)"
Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale, world-renowned and prize-winning novelist (from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset) shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, educated in Romania, Germany, France and the US, authorContinue reading "2.5 Stitching the Past to the Present: Caryl Phillips speaks with Corina Stan (JP)"
Acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsie joins esteemed Oxford scholar Ankhi Mukherjee for a wide-ranging discussion of literature and politics. Ankhi raises the unique challenges facing postcolonial and specifically Muslim writers in the wake of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, including the pressure to become commentators in times of crisis (our episode was recorded in AugustContinue reading "2.4 In Medias Res: Kamila Shamsie and Ankhi Mukherjee (AV)"
Novels, she says, should provide a “vision of life” rather than a “fascinated horror” of it.
The brilliant New York writer Sigrid Nunez‘s most recent novel is What Are You Going Through; her previous one, The Friend, (2018) won the National Book Award. She speaks with Tara Menon, of the Harvard English department, and author of a terrific article about Sigrid Nunez in the Sewanee Review. The conversation ranges widely andContinue reading "2.3 Because I Couldn’t Be a Dancer: Sigrid Nunez and Tara Menon (JP)"
Novelist, screenwriter, and HBO showrunner Tom Perrotta joins his old friend Mark Wollaeger (who also happens to be a top scholar of modernism) for a wide-ranging conversation about literature, television, and everything in between. Tom reveals that he has been reading a most peculiar self-help book: Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Mark then sharesContinue reading "2.2 Adaptation: Tom Perrotta and Mark Wollaeger Go from Page to Screen (AV)"
By Paige Eggebrecht
“The novel wraps itself around you like a cocoon.”
In this first episode of season two of Novel Dialogue, Jennifer Egan speaks of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747) and wonders at the 18th century author’s ability to sustain a creative exploration over “many thousands of pages.” At this prompting, I have been thinking a lot about novels that refuse to let you go. I’ll never forget how Cynthia Wall first introduced Clarissa to our graduate seminar: “you don’t read through Clarissa, you sink into Clarissa. The novel wraps itself around you like a cocoon or being trapped in a web.” Her description was apt. I remember reading for hours at a time, making excruciatingly slow progress through densely packed, oversized pages with teensy font. But I was ensnared by the text’s progress, just as trapped and frustrated as Clarissa herself, and I couldn’t stop reading. I met Lovelaces and Clarissas in the people around me; my emails and texts took on an epistolary verbosity; I dreamt of being unheard, imprisoned, tricked, assaulted; I felt an unfamiliar impulse to write a will and research casket designs.
It’s not that Clarissa is an exceptional novel because of the way it ensnares its reader. Rather it merely exploits, to an exceptional degree, how all novels work. So I believe Richardson would have answered Egan in the same way as a reader would: “you simply get lost in it.” Hearing Egan speak about how A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011) “never felt done” to her, or about Anthony Trollope’s series-within-series worldbuilding, is simply more evidence of the captivating mechanism of novel reading and, as Egan reminds us, novel writing as well. Readers and writers become contained by the worlds novels build. These worlds become touchstones in our own experiences and we cannot help but read our lives through them.
This reminds me of Egan’s other novel The Keep (2006), which I adore for the way it adores its own genre: the Gothic. The Keep gets lost in the Gothic–willfully. Like other Gothic novels, itdeals heavily with the theme of confinement. In this, Egan shows us how genres like the Gothic work as relay systems, reverberating through the tropes and stories that precede them. This reverberative quality is symbolized in The Keep’s image of a radio to the dead, a shoebox filled with dust and furnished with an assortment of dials and knobs punched into the cardboard. Ray, the novel’s frame narrator, initially scoffs at the “radio,” but soon realizes he is also ensnared by a voice. Through a kind of portal, Danny, the protagonist of the story Ray is writing, steps across the narrative boundary to whisper in Ray’s ear, forcing Ray to become an unwilling conduit for his tale.
In The Keep, Ray–like Egan herself and I imagine Richardson and Trollope too–is compelled to craft Danny’s story, to continuously add on new rooms with new doors to existing genres. That is, to create new “portals,” to invoke another theme from the episode, that pass on old stories to new writers and readers. Like the radio to the dead or The Keep’s titular castle–a strange amalgamating pastiche of new wings built onto old buildings and even older fortresses–novels simultaneously become conduits and containers for the plots, conventions, and expectations of their genres. Genres are the captors of novels. Writers and readers, in turn, become entrapped by the stories they tell and keep telling. So my question in response to Egan’s is not how Richardson stayed in Clarissa’s head for so long, but rather, how did he get out?
image source: “Robert Lovelace Preparing to Abduct Clarissa Harlowe,” Wikimedia Commons