Novel Dialogue

Latest Episodes:

9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW) Mar 27, 2025

Show notes

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 want to go to.” It turns out that Ken—acclaimed translator and author of the “silkpunk” epic fantasy series Dandelion Dynasty and the award-winning short story collection The Paper Menagerie—is deeply serious about play. Speaking about play as the key to technological progress, Ken and Rose discuss the importance of whimsy and the inextricable relationship between imagination and usefulness. For Ken, whose Dandelion Dynasty makes heroes of engineers instead of wizards or knights, precise machinery and innovative gadgets are born, like novels, of imagination. Ken himself might be best described as a meticulous, dedicated tinkerer—a writer playing with the materials and stories of the past to help us encounter new worlds in the present. So even if trying to explain his craft is “like asking fish how they swim,” Ken jumps in and discusses how he writes at such different lengths (hint: the longer the book, the more elephantine) and what he makes of different genre labels, from fantasy to historical fiction. We also learn why Ken is a fan of Brat Summer and still thinking about the Roman Empire.

Mentioned in this episode:

Ken Liu, Speaking Bones (2022), The Veiled Throne (2021), The Wall of Storms (2017),
The Grace of Kings (2016), The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016)
Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (2014)
Rose Casey, Jessica Wilkerson, Johanna Winant, “An Open Letter from Faculty at
West Virginia University” (2023)
Rose Casey, “In Defense of Higher Education” (2024)
Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973)
Homer, The Odyssey
Virgil, The Aeneid
John Milton, Paradise Lost
A.M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950)
Brat Summer

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9 Trailer Writing Against the System Mar 21, 2025

Show notes

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 is at work on a book called We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, and she explains how the novel can mark the invisible infrastructures of the internet, defamiliarize the “computational surround” of everyday life, and give us new angles on writing with and against bots. Join us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 9 of Novel Dialogue and to find out what Aarthi's students say when asked: "What would you never automate even if you could?"

Mentions

-Jennifer Egan: “Black Box”

-Teju Cole: Small Fates, Tremor

-Lauren Oyler: Fake Accounts

-Stewart Home

-Tom McCarthy: Satin Island

-Yxta Maya Murray: Art Is Everything

-Fred Benenson

-Xu Bing: Book from the Ground

-Rachel Cusk: Transit

Naomi Alderman

-R.F. Kuang: Yellowface

-Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You

-Sheila Heti, “According to Alice”

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8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries” Dec 19, 2024

Show notes

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

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8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde Dec 05, 2024

Show notes

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 more than a dozen novels and story collections and recently the nonfictional We Loved it All(Norton, 2024)—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.

Mentions:

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

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8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV) Nov 21, 2024

Show notes

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 7 (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.

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8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP) Nov 07, 2024

Show notes

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.

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 Scarry, 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. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they?
Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene)
The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat

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8.2 To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW) Oct 25, 2024

Show notes

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:

Also mentioned:

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8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH) Oct 10, 2024

Show notes

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 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.

Mentions:

Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Oil!, Upton Sinclair
Timothy Morton
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm

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7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH) Jun 20, 2024

Show notes

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, was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and her second novel, Liars, is forthcoming. Tess and Sarah discuss how the threshold between truth and fiction is often used to minimize writing by women and how characters can achieve escape velocity against the pull of violence and abuse. We learn that Sarah doesn’t imagine an audience when she writes—instead, writing articulates something felt in the body, something that remains “uncomfortable until it is so articulated.” From the Yankee thrift of book design and the writing of front matter, acknowledgements, and Sarah’s brilliant titles, we move to 70s-era typography and wordplay with the answer to Season 7’s signature question.

Mentions:

By Sarah Manguso: Very Cold People, 300 Arguments, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, The Two Kinds of Decay and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape in One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in A Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso, and Dave Eggers
Hilary Mantel
Lord Byron, “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad,” from an 1821 letter published in Volume 8 of Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand.
Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

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7.5 Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH) Jun 06, 2024

Show notes

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 for the 2020 Nommo Awards for Best Novel in 2020 by the African Speculative Fiction Society. His responses to Magalí’s questions interweave autobiography and history, showing how when you venture into “underwritten spaces” in South Africa, realism starts to seem like speculation. Masande moves from playing bootleg Nintendo and hacking Lego sets in Ciskei, a “homeland” under the apartheid government’s Bantustan system, to data mining and novel writing in the global cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg. All the while, technology is never something “we’re resigned to experiencing” and “endorsing” in fiction—it can be a medium of contemplation as well as conquest. Masande and Magalí are also interested in the queer intimacies of young people busy forming their own “micro-tribes.” Especially young people who are reading the global phenomenon that is Stephen King by moonlight, when they might be just a little too young for it.

Mentions:

Masande Ntshanga, The Reactive, Triangulum, and the short story “Space”
Samuel R. Delany, Equinox
“Hauntology,” from Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx
Ciskei
Masande Ntshanga’s essay “Technologies of Conquest” in The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making, and Meaning (Dryad Press, 2024)
Stephen King, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
Bonus mention: Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives, an edited volume of short stories, artworks, poems and essays that engage with the tragic destruction of the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town in April 2021.

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