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About Novel Dialogue
Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics.
NBN Episodes hosted by Novel Dialogue:
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…
December 14, 2023
Overtaken by Awe
Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetize…
November 30, 2023
Attention is Love
Just days before the release of her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), three-time National Book Award Finalist and The New York T…
November 16, 2023
“We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Norton, 2022), which won the Booker Prize in 2022, is a thriller that begins in the afterlife,…
November 2, 2023
Narrative, Database, Archive
12 tables; 300 novels, 1500 pages of nature description: This is how Tom Comitta created The Nature Book, a one-of-a-kind novel cut from 300 years of…
October 19, 2023
What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic
Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard for a conversation about …
October 5, 2023
Desolation Tries to Colonize You
Our season of the weird starts off with a conversation between the writer The New Yorker called “the weird Thoreau”, Jeff VanderMeer, and a scholar of…
September 21, 2023
Weirding Out with Kate Marshall
We kick off Season 6 with Kate Marshall, friend of the show and author of the forthcoming book Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Cent…
June 15, 2023
A Forensic Level of Honesty
Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and…
May 18, 2023
The Meat and Bones of Life
With the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse (Flatiron Books, 2022), Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earli…
May 4, 2023
“It’s on the Illabus”
John Jennings—Hugo Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, curator, scholar, and Artist—is keenly aware that in adapting novels for the graph…
April 20, 2023
Writing the Counter-Book
Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura …
April 6, 2023
We Have This-ness, Y’all!
Season 5 of Novel Dialogue opens with an impassioned refresher course in literary theory brought to you by Ocean Vuong, poet and author of the bestsel…
November 17, 2022
Translation is the Closest Way to Read
In our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of transl…
November 3, 2022
The Best Error You Can Make
What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be ma…
October 20, 2022
“A short, sharp punch to the face”
Alia Trabucco Zerán, award-winning author of The Remainder (La Resta), and Women Who Kill (Las Homicidas), and Sophie Hughes, Alia’s translator and fi…