Novel Dialogue
Episodes
10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
09 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Col...
10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Bil...
10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)
13 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Aaron Gwyn is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynn’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All God...
We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel for...
9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 uncan...
9.4 “That In Between Time,” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Scribner, 2024) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent ...
9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 genera...
9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW)
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a bit surprising to hear a writer known for building worlds that incorporate deep historical research and elaborate technological details extol...
9 Trailer Writing Against the System
21 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries”
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Eighteenth century prison break artist and folk hero Jack Sheppard is among history’s most frequently adapted rogues: his exploits have inspired Dan...
8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During a desert thunderstorm outside Tucson, Lydia Millet joined the Novel Dialogue conversation with hosts John Plotz and Emily Hyde, with Emily pl...
8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Te...
8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian ...
8.2 To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)
25 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
An unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward fail...
8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH)
20 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 conversatio...
7.5 Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Building parallels between technology and the human imagination, Masande Ntshanga’s conversation with Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra explains how citie...
7.4 Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Omar El Akkad joins critic Min Hyoung Song for a gripping conversation that interrogates fiction’s relationship to the real. Before he became a no...
7.3 What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone co...
7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Although Katie Kitamura feels free when she writes—free from the “soup of everyday life,” from the political realities that weigh upon her, an...
7.1 Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds (JP)
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly makes time for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and ND host John Plotz. She reads from Th...
6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
14 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabet...
6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath (SW)
30 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Just days before the release of her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), three-time National Book Award Finalist and The New Yor...
6.4 “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”
16 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 afterli...
6.3 Narrative, Database, Archive: Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch (AV)
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
2 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 ...
6.2 What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard for a conversation a...
6.1 Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling (CH)
05 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our season of the weird starts off with a conversation between the writer The New Yorker called “the weird Thoreau”, Jeff VanderMeer, and a sch...
Weirding Out with Kate Marshall
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 Ce...
5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto (AV)
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzu...
5.5 They’re Not Metaphorical Demons: Mariana Enriquez and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
01 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Booker Prize shortlister Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, joins Penn State professor Ma...
5.4 The Meat and Bones of Life
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse, Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earlier fiction and ventur...
5.3 “It’s on the Illabus”
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
John Jennings—Hugo Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, curator, scholar, and Artist—is keenly aware that in adapting novels for the...
5.2 Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning brav...
5.1 We Have This-ness, Y’all!
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 bestse...
4.6 Translation is the Closest Way to Read: Ann Goldstein and Saskia Ziolkowski
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of tran...
4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation b...
4.5a Novel Dialogue Bonus: Jean-Baptiste Naudy Reads from Claude McKay’s "Amiable with Big Teeth"
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this bonus episode, Jean-Baptiste Naudy Reads from Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (English and French). Learn more about your ad choice...
4.4 “A short, sharp punch to the face”: José Revueltas’ The Hole (El Apando) with Alia Trabucco Zerán and Sophie Hughes.
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Alia Trabucco Zerán, award-winning author of The Remainder (La Resta), and Women Who Kill (Las Homicidas), and Sophie Hughes, Alia’s translato...
4.3 Strange Beasts of Translation: Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang in Conversation
06 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
4.2 Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah Quesada
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Boubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, (Indiana UP, 2016; translated by Fiona McLaughlin), an unforgettable novel of the...
4.1 “Sometimes I’m just a little disappointed in English”
08 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A novelist, a translator and a theorist of translation walk into a Zoom Room......Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell, and Kate Briggs provide the perfec...
4.0 Novel Dialogue Season 4: Transitions and Translations
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Introducing Season 4.0 of Novel Dialogue! Hosts John Plotz and Aarthi Vadde welcome new lead hosts Emily Hyde and Chris Holmes. This will be Novel Dia...
3.6 Why are You in Bed? Why are You Drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in Conversation
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Colm Tóibín, the new laureate for Irish fiction, talks to Joseph Rezek of Boston University, and guest host Tara K. Menon of Harvard. The conver...
3.5 The Romance of Recovery: Ben Bateman talks to Shola von Reinhold (AV)
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Shola von Reinhold is the author of LOTE, a novel about getting lost in the archives and finding what the archives have lost. LOTE won the 2021 Ja...
3.4 The Work of Inhabiting a Role: Charles Yu speaks to Chris Fan (JP)
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Scienc...
3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)
03 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conve...
3.2 Promises Unkept: Damon Galgut with Andrew van der Vlies
17 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Guest host Chris Holmes sits down with Booker Prize winning novelist Damon Galgut and Andrew van der Vlies, distinguished scholar of South Afric...
3.1 On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin Cheng
03 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Season three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome ...
72 Caryl Phillips Speaks with Corina Stan
20 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The...
71 Jennifer Egan with Ivan Kreilkamp: Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal (Novel Dialogue crossover, JP)
06 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers togethe...
2.7 The Novel of Revolutionary Ideas: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colleen Lye
16 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer and its sequel The Committed, joins esteemed scholar Colleen Lye of UC-B...
2.6 Dreaming or Thinking: Cristina Rivera Garza with Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas
02 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
ND stages a trialogue this week with MacArthur "Genius" Cristina Rivera Garza and Notre Dame critics Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas. Profess...
2.5 Stitching the Past to the Present: Caryl Phillips speaks with Corina Stan (JP)
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale, world-renowned and prize-winning novelist (from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Su...
2.4 In Medias Res: Kamila Shamsie and Ankhi Mukherjee (AV)
28 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsie joins esteemed Oxford scholar Ankhi Mukherjee for a wide-ranging discussion of literature and politics. Ankhi raises...
2.3 Because I Couldn’t Be a Dancer: Sigrid Nunez and Tara Menon (JP)
14 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The brilliant New York writer Sigrid Nunez‘s most recent novel is What Are You Going Through; her previous one, The Friend, (2018) won the National ...
2.2 Adaptation: Tom Perrotta and Mark Wollaeger Go from Page to Screen (AV)
30 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Novelist, screenwriter, and HBO showrunner Tom Perrotta joins his old friend Mark Wollaeger (who also happens to be a top scholar of modernism) for a ...
2.1 Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal: Jennifer Egan and Ivan Kreilkamp (JP)
16 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We are just delighted to welcome you back to the second season of Novel Dialogue, putting scholars and writers together to chew the fat, and spill sec...
1.9 Season Wrap: Aarthi and John Reflect and Ruminate
29 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Our two hosts play guest, and dive into the season’s high and lowlights, starting with the role humor played on the show. We also talk through the a...
1.8 The Novel is like a Stack of Yurts: George Saunders talks with Michael Johnston (AV)
22 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Novel Dialogue sits down with Michael Johnston of Purdue University and George Saunders, master of the short story form and author of the Booker-prize...
1.7 Helen Garner is Hacking at the Adverbs (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)
15 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patria...
1.6 Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny: Kameron Hurley with Gerry Canavan (AV)
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Gerry Canavan talks to geek feminist author Kameron Hurley about her Hugo-nominated novel The Light Brigade. A love-hate letter to military science fi...
1.5 Getting Into Other Worlds: James Robertson with Penny Fielding (JP)
01 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
James Robertson, brilliant author of The Testament of Gideon Mack, and University of Edinburgh’s top prof. Penny Fielding beam in from their respect...
1.4 Feral Fiction: Catherine Lacey and Martin Puchner (JP)
25 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Novel Dialogue sends Martin Puchner (polymathic author of The Written World and most recently The Language of Thieves) out to speak with Pew author Ca...
1.3 Oh, The Places You’ll Go: Madhuri Vijay talks to Ulka Anjaria (AV)
18 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ulka Anjaria and Madhuri Vijay sit down to talk about Madhuri’s prize-winning first novel The Far Field. They discuss what it’s like to write inti...
1.2 That Demonic Novelistic Impulse: Orhan Pamuk with Bruce Robbins (JP)
11 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Episode Two of Novel Dialogue, critic and scholar Bruce Robbins sits down with Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. They have taught classes on the politica...
1.2x Bonus: Orhan Pamuk Reads and Glosses the End of Snow
11 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Pamuk plays scholar and novelist both. He reads the cheekily postmodernist final page of his novel Snow, while also talmudically interspersing comment...
1.1 Do Great Novels Set the Standard or Challenge it? Kelly Rich and Teju Cole (AV)
04 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Novel Dialogue kicks off with the writer and photographer Teju Cole and literary critic Kelly Rich of Harvard University talking about “saying yes t...
1.0 Introducing a New Podcast: Novel Dialogue with Aarthi Vadde and John Plotz
03 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Novel Dialogue : where unlikely conversation partners come together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. Join Aarthi Vadde, a sch...