Novel Dialogue

Latest Episodes:

3.1 On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin Cheng Feb 03, 2022

Show notes

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

Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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72 Caryl Phillips Speaks with Corina Stan Jan 20, 2022

Show notes

Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more.

It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United), reflects on his abiding loyalty to his class and geographic origins and his fondness for the moments of Sunday joy that allow people to endure. John raises Orhan Pamuk’s claim (In Novel Dialogue last season) that the novel is innately middle-class; Caryl says that it’s true that as a form it has always taken time and money to make–and to read. But “vicars and middle class people fall in love, too; they get betrayed and let down…a gamut of emotion that’s as wide as anybody else.” He remains drawn to writers haunted by the past: Eliot, W.G. Sebald, the huge influence of Faulkner trying to stitch the past to the present.

Mentioned in the Episode

James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charley, The Fire Next Time
Richard Wright, Native Son
Johnny Pitts, Afropean
Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark
J. M. Coetzee, “What We like to Forget” (On Caryl Phillips)
Graham Greene (e.g Brighton Rock and The Quiet American) wrote in “The Lost Childhood” (1951) that at age 14 ” I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf…From that moment I began to write.”
Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom

Read a transcript here

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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71 Jennifer Egan with Ivan Kreilkamp: Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal (Novel Dialogue crossover, JP) Jan 06, 2022

Show notes

This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. (If you want to hear more, RtB 53 featured Nobel Orhan Pamuk, RtB 54 brought in Helen Garner, and in RtB 72 we haveCaryl Phillips). Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan--prolific and prize-winning American novelist--than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread.

Jennifer Egan © Pieter M. van Hattem

Their conversation ranges widely over Egan’s oeuvre–not to mention 18th and 19th century literature. Trollope, Richardson and Fielding are praised and compared to modern phenomena like TikTok and gamers streaming (including gamers streaming chess, a very special instance of getting inside someone else’s thought process). The PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad gets special treatment, and tantalizing details from Egan’s forthcoming novel, The Candy House (April, 2022) make an appearance. Egan discusses her authorial impulse towards camouflage, her play with genre’s relationship to specialized lingos and argots–and the way a genre’s norms and structure can function like a “lifeline” and also a “portal.”

Mentioned in the Episode

Jennifer Egan: Visit from the Goon Squad; Look at Me; Manhattan Beach; The Keep
Samuel Richardson: Clarissa; Pamela
Henry Fielding, Shamela
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Patrick O’Brian (e.g. Master and Commander)
Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat

Read the transcript here.

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2.7 The Novel of Revolutionary Ideas: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colleen Lye Dec 16, 2021

Show notes

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 work and wonders if he considers himself a member of the theory generation (those writers for whom literary theory is not just a way of reading texts but an impetus to create new literary forms for grappling with ideas). Viet, schooled in deconstruction and postcolonial theory, accepts the designation with a caveat: If he is a novelist of ideas, then he is a novelist of revolutionary ideas. Inspired by Fanon's anticolonialism and Gayatri Spivak's concept of the double bind, Viet's defiantly politicizing aesthetic looks to place the colonial subject, particularly the Vietnamese refugee, at the center of multiple stories of American and French imperialism.

Colleen and Viet reflect on the role of academic training in Viet's transformation from Asian-Americanist scholar into Asian-American novelist and discuss the peculiarities of immigrant Asian identity in terms of language. Mother tongues, bilingualism, orphaned language, and adopted language all become metaphors for how Asian-American writers must balance the loss of heritage and weight of expectation with the call to self-invention. Plus, Viet reveals the not-so-wholesome treats that enabled him to complete The Sympathizer!

Mentioned in the Episode

Transcript Available Here: https://noveldialogue.org/transcripts/

Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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2.6 Dreaming or Thinking: Cristina Rivera Garza with Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas Dec 02, 2021

Show notes

ND stages a trialogue this week with MacArthur "Genius" Cristina Rivera Garza and Notre Dame critics Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas. Professor Rivera Garza recalls roadtripping through Mexico in a bochito (a Volkswagen). For her, such drives became the mother of literary invention: there was no car radio and when family conversations died down, the window (and not an iPhone) became the screen that occupied her. In a more serious vein, CRG, Kate, and Dominique also discuss the role of linguistic mobility and translation in bringing Rivera Garza’s novels and essays to English-speaking audiences. CRG reflects on how books change when they cross languages and reminds us that the United States is the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. This episode productively estranges us from a number of received narratives about national monolingualism and experimental writing. Professor Rivera Garza rejects the notion of aesthetic individualism and the idealized image of the solitary writer. She declares that language always has plural roots and her work is underpinned by the belief that we only become individuals when community fails.

Mentioned in the Episode

Transcript available here.

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2.5 Stitching the Past to the Present: Caryl Phillips speaks with Corina Stan (JP) Nov 11, 2021

Show notes

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, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature.

It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United), reflects on his abiding loyalty to his class and geographic origins and his fondness for the moments of Sunday joy that allow people to endure. John raises Orhan Pamuk’s claim (In Novel Dialogue last season) that the novel is innately middle-class; Caryl says that it’s true that as a form it has always taken time and money to make–and to read. But “vicars and middle class people fall in love, too; they get betrayed and let down…a gamut of emotion that’s as wide as anybody else.” He remains drawn to writers haunted by the past: Eliot, W.G. Sebald, the huge influence of Faulkner trying to stitch the past to the present.

And his treat? Caryl treasures his ability to stop writing; he turned down a Guardian column because he hopes to have the good manners to shut up when he has no thought pressing to get out. But when the writing itself stops being a treat?

Mentioned in the Episode

James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charley, The Fire Next Time
Richard Wright, Native Son
Johnny Pitts, Afropean
Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark
J. M. Coetzee, “What We like to Forget” (On Caryl Phillips)
Graham Greene (e.g Brighton Rock and The Quiet American) wrote in “The Lost Childhood” (1951) that at age 14 ” I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf…From that moment I began to write.”
Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom

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2.4 In Medias Res: Kamila Shamsie and Ankhi Mukherjee (AV) Oct 28, 2021

Show notes

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 August as American troops withdrew from Afghanistan). Kamila reserves the right of mental freedom in the face of such expectations. Early in her career, she turned down the opportunity to become a “professional Muslim” and never looked back. Yet, as Ankhi points out, Kamila’s novels from Burnt Shadows to Home Fire, balance writing to the moment with writing for posterity. We discuss how Kamila’s work aligns mythic structures with historical detail and how Sophocles’ Antigone became the “marrow in the bones” of Home Fire. As if that were not enough to whet the appetite, we also discover what’s cooking in Kamila’s kitchen!

Mentioned in the Episode

Newsnight
John Hersey
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
Colum McCann
Hisham Matar
Antigone
Jacques Lacan
Seamus Heaney
Martha Nussbaum
George Steine

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2.3 Because I Couldn’t Be a Dancer: Sigrid Nunez and Tara Menon (JP) Oct 14, 2021

Show notes

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 and then plunges into depths. Because life is defined by grief and mourning, so too are my novels, says Nunez. She thinks her upbringing with immigrant parents who felt adrift from their homeland and her own “failure” as a dancer (recounted in her 1995 debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God ) are the ferment from which her vocation as a writer arose. The question of genre is tossed around:”fictional memoir” perhaps, which gets confused (insultingly, Tara thinks!) with auto-fiction. But Sigrid is fascinated by establishing a reality that is entirely made-up (“not a single friend angry!”), yet also documentary in nature. Perhaps the best tag for her work is “essay novel”: that allows one to do what Javier Marias calls “literary thinking.” And there’s a wonderfully non-Pavlovian answer to the treat question: sometimes you can just have the whiskey….

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (1979)
W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn (1995)
V. S. Naipaul, Bend in the River (1979), Enigma of Arrival (1987)
Annie Ernaux also writes a kind of auto-fiction that resonates with the fictional presence of a “real” first person
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
“Docu-novel” of Svetlana Alexeievich (author of Secondhand Time, 2013, which while wonderful is not a novel…)

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2.2 Adaptation: Tom Perrotta and Mark Wollaeger Go from Page to Screen (AV) Sep 30, 2021

Show notes

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 shares some juicy Joyce anecdotes before getting into the nitty gritty of style and craft. We discuss balancing difficult themes with accessible prose and debate whether a therapeutic model of novel-writing (where characters grow and change) can translate into a therapeutic model of culture (where social and political norms can grow and change). Speaking of growing and changing, adaptation is at the center of this episode as we revisit Tom’s amazing work on The Leftovers, Mrs. Fletcher, Little Children, and of course, Election.

Mentioned in the Episode

James Joyce: Ulysses: Finnegans Wake
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
Stephen King
Philip Roth
Alexander Payne
Jim Taylor
Damon Lindelof
Reese Witherspoon
Matthew Broderick
Hillary Clinton

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2.1 Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal: Jennifer Egan and Ivan Kreilkamp (JP) Sep 16, 2021

Show notes

We are just delighted to welcome you back to the second season of Novel Dialogue, putting scholars and writers together to chew the fat, and spill secrets of the trade. It begins with a bang; who better to interview the prolific and prize-winning American novelist Jennifer Egan than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread.

Their conversation with John ranges widely over Egan’s oeuvre–not to mention 18th and 19th century literature. Trollope, Richardson and Fielding are praised and compared to modern phenomena like TikTok and gamers streaming (including gamers streaming chess, a very special instance of getting inside someone else’s thought process). The PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad gets special treatment, and tantalizing details from her Egan’s forthcoming The Candy House make an appearance. Egan discusses her authorial impulse towards camouflage, her play with genre’s relationship to specialized lingos and argots–and the way a genre’s norms and structure can function like a “lifeline” and also a “portal.” Her backyard post-writing treat is also revealed: perfect for the pandemic.

N.B. John bungled two Egan publication dates in his introduction; in reality, Emerald City and Other Stories came out in 1996 and The Invisible Circus in 1995.

Mentioned in the Episode

Jennifer Egan: Visit from the Goon Squad; Look at Me; Manhattan Beach; The Keep
Samuel Richardson: Clarissa: Pamela
Henry Fielding, Shamela
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Patrick O’Brian (e.g. Master and Commander)
Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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