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Novel Dialogue
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.
March 13, 2026
Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions
Aaron Gwyn is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynn’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All God’s Childr…
June 5, 2025
We Better Laugh About It
Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel form. Á…
May 22, 2025
Who Owns These Tools?
In 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…
May 8, 2025
“That In Between Time"
Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Scribner, 2024) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our w…
April 24, 2025
Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable
In 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…
April 10, 2025
Monstrous Dreaming
What 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 generati…
March 27, 2025
Novels are Like Elephants
It’s a bit surprising to hear a writer known for building worlds that incorporate deep historical research and elaborate technological details extol t…
March 21, 2025
Writing Against the System
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 …
December 19, 2024
“I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”
Eighteenth century prison break artist and folk hero Jack Sheppard is among history’s most frequently adapted rogues: his exploits have inspired Danie…
December 5, 2024
And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde
During a desert thunderstorm outside Tucson, Lydia Millet joined the Novel Dialogue conversation with hosts John Plotz and Emily Hyde, with Emily play…
November 21, 2024
All of Our Stories Were War Stories
Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terr…
November 7, 2024
Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness
What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form…
October 25, 2024
To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi
An unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward failure a…
October 10, 2024
Dirt Bag Novels
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 for…
June 20, 2024
Escape Velocity
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 Sa…
June 6, 2024
Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)
Building parallels between technology and the human imagination, Masande Ntshanga’s conversation with Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra explains how cities are …
May 24, 2024
Not Prophecy but Inversion
Omar El Akkad joins critic Min Hyoung Song for a gripping conversation that interrogates fiction’s relationship to the real. Before he became a noveli…
May 9, 2024
What do the PDFs say about this?
Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could …
April 25, 2024
You Write Because You Want to Feel Free
Although Katie Kitamura feels free when she writes—free from the “soup of everyday life,” from the political realities that weigh upon her, and even a…
April 11, 2024
Etherized
Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly makes time for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and ND host John Plotz. She reads from The Wr…