Podcast
Novel Dialogue
Hosted by Aarthi Vadde and John Plotz · EN
Novel Dialogue: where unlikely conversation partners come together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. What makes us special? Critics and novelists in conversation. Breaking down the boundaries between critical, creative, and just plain quirky, Novel Dialogue’s approach is wide-ranging and unconventional. Ever wondered what Jennifer Egan thinks of TikTok, how Ruth Ozeki honed her craft working on the movie Mutant Hunt, or if Colm Tóibín will ever write a novel about an openly gay novelist? Join us for lively conversations hosted by scholars who admire and write about the novelists that help shape our literary culture. Learn more about Novel Dialogue here.
14episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
1w ago00:42:40Tap to summarizeHow to write about place is a question that cuts across the career of the South African Ivan Vladislavić. The questions of place and space are pressing ones in the context of South Africa, where the transition to democracy in 1994 included a redrawing of the national map, and the last three decades have seen the large-scale transformation of urban centers such as Johannesburg. What defines Johannesburg a literary city? asks the critic Jeanne-Marie Jackson. From this unfurls a series of reflections about the writer’s relationship to place and the various ways in which narrative form can be bent to capture the experience of place—and in particular the experience of a place as it changes across time. The resulting work may feel fragmentary, Ivan allows, but that is a function of the nature of place rather than an imposition on the part of the writer. Finally, the conversation turns toward Ivan’s choice to study Afrikaans literature in the 1970s. As a tradition often at odds with Afrikaner politics and urgently concerned with the world Ivan himself inhabited, reading the work of Afrikaans writers such as Ingrid Winterbach, Entienne Leroux, André Brink, and Breyten Breytenbach offered a vital counterpoint to Ivan’s training in the English canon. Ivan closes by fondly remembering the teacher who introduced him to the writer’s notebook, a habit that continues to be crucial to his practice today. Mentioned in this episode: The Folly Double Negative The Near North Zoë Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town Georges Pérec Gauteng John Miles, Ampie Coetzee, Ernst Lindenberg, and Taurus Publishers Marlene van Niekerk Nadine Gordimer The Goon Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
Apr 900:40:40Tap to summarizeChicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter ( Little Brown and Company, 2025). In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of “Midwestern Weimar” and the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, holding forth as many as six times a week for 60 years, wrote a garrulous, glamorous story of the city. While the increasingly unhinged narrator of his novel investigates the mysterious death of Kupcinet’s daughter in 1963, Peter delves into his own family’s history, anxiously asking “we can’t hurt our dead, can we?” The novel swerves between fact and fiction, including photographs that are both real artifacts from the historical record and staged photos that participate in the fictional world of the novel. Peter laughs off this contradiction, remarking “the closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes.” How to describe such a complicated novel? Sarah offers this gem: “It’s as if Philip Roth were less cancellable and wrote a murder mystery,” a line that results in a poignant conversation about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago in middle of the 20th century and what it means to be a cultural outsider, “just slightly outside of the circle.” Peter brings the conversation to a close with a memory of going to the University of Tish.Mentions: Reverend Hightower appears in William Faulkner’s Light in August Irv “Kup” and Essie Kupcinet were Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet’s parents An Edna O’Brien story appears in Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano Phyllis Diller at the Palmer House Bette Howland’s line about Chicago being “the raw materials for a city” appears in Blue in Chicago Alberto Paniagua Philip Roth Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel’s Floaters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
Mar 2600:43:57Tap to summarizeCan a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus. Mentioned in this episode By Billy-Ray Belcourt: A Minor Chorus A History of My Brief Body This Wound is a World Also mentioned: The Summer Day “Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel” Rachel Cusk, The Shakespeare and Company Interview “The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis” “100 Things About Writing a Novel” Mourning Diary Ann Cvetkovich Joshua Whitehead Mourning and Melancholia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)
Mar 1300:46:37Tap to summarizeAaron Gwyn is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynn’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All God’s Children, which won the Oklahoma Book award, and The Cannibal Owl. In his conversation with Sean McCann of Wesleyan (A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government and Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism) and Novel Dialogue’s own John Plotz, we learn that Robert Lemmons is a real historical figure and so is Levi English.One way to grasp Gwyn’s achievement is to consider the contrast between his durably realist work and Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Blood Meridian. Much as Aaron and Sean admire that novel, McCarthy’s characters strike them as monstrous and incredible. How about Charles Portis’s True Grit, asks John? Aaron loves it for its ventriloquizing power, and its truth-loving willingness to weave in unsettling back stories like Rooster Cogburn’s ties to Quantrill’s Rangers, an eerily modern pro-Confederate terrorist paramilitary. In our signature question, we learn why Aaron’s favorite teacher was Robert Hill, Pink-Floyd-loving drummer and perennial inspiration (audio here). Mentioned in the episode: Richard Slotkin’s notion of “the man who knows Indians” comes from Gunfighter Nation Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) Herman Melville, Moby Dick William Faulkner Absalom Absalom Toni Morrison, Beloved Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. John Williams, Stoner (but also Butcher’s Crossing –-which John loves— and Augustus, which did indeed split the National Book Award (not the Pulitzer) in 1973 with John Barth’s Chimera. Larry McMurtry’s hard-to-get-into Lonesome Dove Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
Jun 500:47:03Tap to summarizeÁlvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel form. Álvaro, author of the trippy You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead, 2024), explains how the opening letter to his translator Natasha mirrors the letter to his editor, Teresa, in Spanish, and how both letters become part of the fiction. Fitting for a novel that crosses Nahua and Mayan, Moctezuma and Cortés, Mexican history and the glam rock band T. Rex. The English translation—which Álvaro calls the book of Natasha—is longer, filled with changes and additions and revisions, and so translation becomes “another life for the book.” From the living book to its contents, Maia asks how You Dreamed of Empires blends the gorgeous and the grotesque, slapstick humor and extreme violence, historical detail and mischievous metafictional departures. Álvaro links his work to Season 9’s theme of TECH by pointing out the novel’s longstanding use as a tool to laugh about the powerful, to tell them that what they’re saying is not true, and to articulate politics through contradiction and humor. After discussing the encounter of Moctezuma and Cortés (or really, of their translators, including a very magical bite of cactus) as the moment that changes everything in history, Álvaro makes a surprising historical swerve in his answer to this season’s signature question. Mentions:Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death, You Dreamed of Empires, Now I SurrenderNahuaNatasha WimmerTeresa Ariño, AnagramaSergio Pitol, Enrique Vila-Matas, Javier Marías, Roberto BolañoMiguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; Laurence Sterne; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s TravelsOctavio Paz saying New Spain was a kingdom in One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, translated by Helen R. Lane.Edward SaidLèse-majestéT. Rex, “Monolith”Gonzalo GuerreroThe Colegio de Santa Cruz de TlatelolcoJosé Emilio PachecoMichel FoucaultMichelangeloSaint Paul, Epistle to the RomansNoam ChomskyTlaxcalas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)
May 2200:48:58Tap to summarizeIn an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “is the main tool we have to bridge the divide.” She explains that the motivation in Searches as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication—or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: she and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today’s media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers’ paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that “don’t have a perspective,” makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too “out there,” stay tuned for Vauhini’s down-to-earth answer to our signature question. Mentioned in this episode: Vauhini Vara, Searches (2025), The Immortal King Rao (2022), “My Decade in Google Searches” (2019) Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580) Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (2023) Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (2024), “According to Alice” (2023) Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools will never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →9.4 “That In Between Time,” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)
May 8, 202500:52:05Tap to summarizeFernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Scribner, 2024) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our world into something uncannily similar to the one imagined in the Uruguayan writer’s fourth novel. Here, an environmental disaster that begins as red algae bloom in the oceans has produced a toxic wind that kills most living creatures. As the plague spreads, the protagonist chooses to remain in her coastal city, caring for a boy with a rare genetic disorder. Published in an English translation by Heather Cleary as the pandemic waned, Pink Slime continues to push against the limits of genre categories, balancing on that delicate edge between science fiction and literary realism. In dialogue with Cleary—a prolific translator of contemporary Latin American fiction who is also a critic and scholar of translation—Trías unfolds the many different ideas explored in Pink Slime, including the ethical complexities of writing about illness and disability, the difficult intimacies of mothers and daughters (and other potentially toxic relationships), how it is that we experience time and memory, and what it means to live with the looming threat of ecological collapse. Pink Slime, like Trías’s other novels, is also interested in the narrative potential of confined spaces, which constrain the movement of plot and allow for new possibilities in building characters’ psychological depth. The conversation also gets into the question of time and narrative tense when it comes to narrating the experience of disaster—a question that was crucial for the novelist as much as the translator. Together, Trías and Cleary also get into the intricacies of translation, including word choice, sound, rhythm, breath, and how to make jokes work across languages. Mentioned in this episode: The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction Prader-Wilis syndrome Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir N. Pino Luna The other pink slime Trías, El monte de las furias Plumsock Endowed Residency, Yaddo Artist’s Community (the residency that Trías briefly names toward the end of the conversation) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)
Apr 24, 202500:48:52Tap to summarizeIn Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020), his vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. In only five years, it may have become the most influential work of climate fiction ever—perhaps right up there with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its thoroughly shocking ability to jump into the political fray.Flanked by Novel Dialogue’s John Plotz, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asks him to reflect on the book’s impact. He brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civilization is very bad. And ignoring it…is not going to work.”Mentioned in the Episode:--Pact for the Future--COP 26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference)--COP 30 (where KSR will be a UN rep….)--Planetary boundaries J. Rockstrom (et. al.)--Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds--Paris Agreement--Don’t Look Up--Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
Apr 10, 202500:47:01Tap to summarizeWhat work can genre do today? And can the genre system become more than a method of reductive containment and market segmentation—can it be a generative source of imaginative chaos? Few are as qualified to address these questions as Lauren Beukes, whose simultaneous embrace of genres from science fiction to crime to horror and refusal to abide within their borders—what she calls her “Big Fuck You Energy”—has rendered her, by her own account, “basically un-shelve-able.” Beukes is joined by crime fiction scholar (and novelist) Andrew Pepper of Queen’s University Belfast for a conversation that dances across her oeuvre’s many genres. They delve into how Beukes first encountered genre through the allegories that writers used to navigate the apartheid state of South Africa; how Beukes’ experiences of femicidal violence and police apathy inspired her work in genre-bent crime (“At least in novels I get to have justice,” she tells us); the inflection of dystopia from different global perspectives; and the role of speculative fiction in helping clarify political enemies in an age of obfuscation. Pepper and Beukes also think about genre in more practical terms, from the logistics of keeping track of plotlines when crafting time travel or multiverse novels to what it means to be a “high concept” author in a market designed for distracted audiences.Mentioned in this Episode Lauren Beukes, Moxyland, Zoo City, The Shining Girls (and AppleTV adaptation), Broken Monsters, Bridge Margaret Atwood and speculative fiction China Miéville and the New Weird Kazuo Ishiguro Lauren Berlant Ivy Pochoda, These Women Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution Hannibal Lecter Crooked and Obscene Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Rick and Morty Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Everything Everywhere All At Once E.L. Doctorow Plotters vs. Pantsers Severance Nnedi Okorafor Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark A.K. Blakemore, The Glutton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW)
Mar 27, 202500:46:25Tap to summarizeIt’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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →