Nov 5, 2026

11.3 “Thank god for editors”: Imbolo Mbue and Sarah Dimick (RB)

Imbolo Mbue

Hosted by Chris Holmes

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Summary

In this episode, novelist Imbolo Mbue and critic Sarah Dimick dive into the literary ecosystem from an author’s perspective. Imbolo recalls her formative experiences in public libraries when she first emigrated from Cameroon to the United States, and how her encounters with American literature, especially Oprah’s Book Club picks, shaped her sense of literary possibility. Imbolo’s first novel, Behold the Dreamers, was itself an Oprah’s Book Club selection. In a conversation that moves across Imbolo’s career, from Behold the Dreamers to How Beautiful We Were to the newly released Every Story Is a Love Story, Imbolo and Sarah probe multiple dimensions of the literary ecosystem. They take up networks of literary production: how Imbolo writes both with and against readers’ expectations and desires; how her reading shapes her writing, particularly the memoirs of forgiveness (or the lack thereof) that informed Every Story Is a Love Story; the editorial pressures against which she has been glad to stand her ground, and the ones that have shaped her work for (in her assessment) the better, including a critical intervention from Random House’s Andy Ward that moved Every Story is a Love Story away from punishment and toward the urgent if unsexy problem of forgiveness. They also address what Sarah suggests is another unity across Imbolo’s fiction, in addition to a formal and thematic interest in aftermath: namely, the energy infrastructures—oil, transit, cars—that allow characters to move forward through the world even as they enact extractive harm.

Mentions:

Oprah's Book Club
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Chinua Achebe
Toni Morrison
Jonathan Franzen
Junot Díaz
Salman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Michelle Obama's Becoming
Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow
Roxane Gay, "Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof"
Random House's Andy Ward
Verdi’s Aida
Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me

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Chris Holmes

Chris Holmes is Professor of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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