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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“That In Between Time”: Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary
“I always feel that when I write, it’s like weaving senses.”
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Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Our partner podcast 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. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set…
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Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
“I guess my actual process is probably despair and cortisol.”
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Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey
“All fictional works are in some sense defined by the moment they were written and what their authors were trying to experience.”
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Novel Dialogue Season 9 Trailer: Writing Against the System with Aarthi Vadde
In the trailer for Season 9 of Novel Dialogue, Aarthi Vadde looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history.
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“I Love a Dialectical Reader, and Best Is a Dialectical Reader Who Cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan
“I really just wanted to write a novel—I guess to me, this feels very queer—but a novel that was about tenderness and militancy.”
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And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde
“The longer I’m alive, the more convinced I become that human exceptionalism is our original sin.”
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All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti
“I had an innate sense as a child that the war was a deep part of who my parents were, so tied up in how they told stories and how they understood reality and existed in the world.”
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Aspire to Magic but End Up with Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs Speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
“I’m aiming for something emotional, psychological, but I want it as an emergent property.”
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To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi
“What can be said with language, a human invention, about something as ineffable and ephemeral as love or desire or rage or loneliness or despair, fear of God?”
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Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward
“When I think about the novels that sort of shaped me as a younger reader, they’re often books that I call the dirt bag novel, which is sort of a reformulation of the bildungsroman.”
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Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty
“It’s still a vast mystery to me how one can write knowing anything at all what they’re about to write.”
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Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
“Literature has this remarkable, almost miraculous, ability to distill human experience.”
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Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song
“What matters to me is fidelity to something else entirely, which is how human beings are and how human beings should be and the chasm between those two things, which I think is what literature is for.”
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What Do the PDFs Say about This?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow
“What are the systems of power in this fictional context andthe story world I’m making? What are the stakes? What are the values?”
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You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel
“I grew up with this very firm sense that there were multiple places that I could consider a home, rather than homes simply.”
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Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds
“There is a kind of moment of doom when you commit to a character. Because none of my characters are lovely.”
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Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
“When you call a book ‘autofiction,’ you released yourself from the responsibility of actually looking at what the book is doing.”
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Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath
“I wanted to make nature a source of conflict, but also a source of joy and beauty and wonder and delight.”
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“We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”: Shehan Karunatilaka and Sangeeta Ray
“Seven Moons” makes space for the cacophony of ghostly voices of those killed and disappeared in Sri Lanka’s long civil war.
