Category
Novel Dialogue
Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them.
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Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman
“You want to go outside yourself and imagine your way into some other space? Go for it. If you want to try and imagine yourself into what you think is your own space, go for it. I say it’s equally as hard.”
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Narrative, Database, Archive: Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch
“How I made the book determined the story that was created … Once you have enough of something, a narrative can emerge.”
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What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington
“You need your heroes to have flaws.”
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Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling
“Weird fiction is unusual, too, in how the unknown may be both horrific and incredibly beautiful.”
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Weirding Out with Kate Marshall
In the intro to season 6 of Novel Dialogue, Kate Marshall gets weird: “I was looking at writers who were considering themselves part of a new weird, and I wanted to ask what the old weird was, and so I started looking.”
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A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto
“There came a point in my life … where I realized that almost every narrative, whatever it came from, that dealt with an African country was pretty much a rewriting of ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
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They’re Not Metaphorical Demons: Mariana Enríquez and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
“As a horror trope, the child is always scary. It turns our notions of purity, innocence, violence, upside down.”
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“The Meat and Bones of Life”: Erika T. Wurth and Leif Sorensen
“I’m not a political scientist. I didn’t major in Native American studies. I’m a doctor of metaphors.”
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It’s on the Illabus: Jean-Christophe Cloutier and John Jennings
“Everything in the comic has to be thought about from front cover to end … How are you going to use all the secret resources of comics?”
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Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard
“I was exorcising, if not the anxiety of influence, then the accusations of the anxiety of influence, and also issuing somewhat of a corrective.”
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We Have This-ness Y’all! Ocean Vuong and Amy E. Elkins
“If you’re going to write in a worthwhile way about something, you have to really understand why you care.”
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Reading by Translating: Ann Goldstein Talks with Saskia Ziolkowski
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 public…
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Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay
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…
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“A Short, Sharp Punch to the Face”: Alia Trabucco Zerán and Sophie Hughes Talk Translation
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…
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Strange Beasts of Translation: Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang in Conversation
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…
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Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah Quesada
“I was more impressed by what I heard from my mother than by what I read in the library.”
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Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell, and Kate Briggs on Translation
“You’re making decisions with every word, and a lot of times, those decisions are unconscious.”
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Why Are You in Bed? Why Are You Drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in Conversation
“The novel loves things. It loves money. It loves disappointment.”
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The Romance of Recovery: Ben Bateman Talks to Shola von Reinhold
“I don’t really want to write about theory, but it just keeps coming up again and again. It’s inescapable.”
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The Work of Inhabiting a Role: Charles Yu Speaks to Chris Fan
“I am paralyzed by the infinite degrees of freedom that you start out with, and so constraints can be freeing. To say, I can start here—I’m writing a story about time travel.”
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In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans
“I’m aware, as I’m writing, that I’m changing camera angles.”
