Novel Dialogue Aarthi Vadde and John Plotz

Building parallels between technology and the human imagination, Masande Ntshanga’s conversation with Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra explains how cities are like machines and how South African history resembles some of the most sinister versions of techno-futurism. Masande is the author of two novels: The Reactive, winner of a Betty Trask Award in 2018, and Triangulum, nominated for the 2020 Nommo Awards for Best Novel in 2020 by the African Speculative Fiction Society. His responses to Magalí’s questions interweave autobiography and history, showing how when you venture into “underwritten spaces” in South Africa, realism starts to seem like speculation. Masande moves from playing bootleg Nintendo and hacking Lego sets in Ciskei, a “homeland” under the apartheid government’s Bantustan system, to data mining and novel writing in the global cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg. All the while, technology is never something “we’re resigned to experiencing” and “endorsing” in fiction—it can be a medium of contemplation as well as conquest. Masande and Magalí are also interested in the queer intimacies of young people busy forming their own “micro-tribes.” Especially young people who are reading the global phenomenon that is Stephen King by moonlight, when they might be just a little too young for it.
Mentions:

Masande Ntshanga, The Reactive, Triangulum, and the short story “Space”

Samuel R. Delany, Equinox


“Hauntology,” from Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx


Ciskei

Masande Ntshanga’s essay “Technologies of Conquest” in The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making, and Meaning (Dryad Press, 2024)

Stephen King, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger


Bonus mention: Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives, an edited volume of short stories, artworks, poems and essays that engage with the tragic destruction of the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town in April 2021.


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Omar El Akkad joins critic Min Hyoung Song for a gripping conversation that interrogates fiction’s relationship to the real. Before he became a novelist, Omar was a journalist, and his experiencing reporting on (among other subjects) the war on terror, the Arab Spring, and the Black Lives Matter movement profoundly shapes his fiction. His first novel, American War (Vintage, 2018), follows the protagonist’s radicalization against the backdrop of afossil fuel-motivated civil war. His second, What Strange Paradise (Vintage, 2022), is a haunting retelling of Peter Pan focused on a young Syrian refugee. But as Omar and Min’s dialogue reveals, literary criticism doesn’t always get the politics of political fiction right. Their conversation moves from the preoccupation with “literal prophecy” which plagues the reception of speculative fiction in general and climate fiction in particular to the multifaceted appeal of the fantastical in writing migration stories. They discuss Omar’s interest not in extrapolation, but in inversion. And they take up the imaginative challenges posed by climate change: the way it fails to fit zero-sum colonial ideologies; the way it relies upon the continued development of “the muscle of forgetting, the muscle of looking away.” Finally, Omar’s answer to the signature question is a case study in the inversion that characterizes his work: Little Women readers, prepare yourselves!
Mentioned in This Episode

Paolo Bacigalupi

Kim Stanley Robinson

Barbara Kingsolver

Jenny Offill

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement

Barack Obama, “A New Beginning: Remarks by the President at Cairo University, 6-04-09”

Stephen Markley, The Deluge

Alan Kurdi (photographed by Nilüfer Demir)

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West


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Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could get punched in the face.” Brandon, author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans, joins Stephanie Insley Hershinow for a wide-ranging, engrossing, and often hilarious conversation about the stakes of the novel today. They discuss Brandon’s “Hot Freud Summer,” during which he read all of Sigmund Freud’s essential works, as an example of an intellectual journey that engages with what Brandon calls the PDFs of criticism: the histories of ideas that he wishes to track back to their origins. Along the way, Brandon reveals what he has taken away from the Romance genre (“everything”), his conviction that The House of Mirth is the prototypical social media novel, and how he tries to avoid writing characters that are just “three spritzes of a personality standing in a room.” Brandon, Stephanie, and Chris close things out with their answers to the signature question about the first books they loved, and the answers are…revealing.
Mentioned in this episode
By Brandon Taylor:

Real Life

Filthy Animals

The Late Americans

Also mentioned:

The House of Mirth

The Liberal Imagination

Georg Lukács

Frederick Jameson

Germinal

Debbie Macomber

Julianne MacLean

Johanna Lindsey

Liz Carlyle, Beauty Like the Night

Beverly Jenkins

A is for Apple, W is for Witch

Guinness Book of World Records

Gremlins: The Novelization of the Film


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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 at times from the limits of her own thinking—she is keenly aware of the unfreedoms her novels explore. Katie, author of the award-winning Intimacies (2021), talks with critic Alexander Manshel about the darker corners of the human psyche and the inescapable contours of history that shape her fiction. Alexander and Katie explore how she brings these tensions to “the space of interpretation, where the book exists” and places trust in her readers to dwell there thoughtfully. They also discuss the influence of absent men (including Henry James), love triangles, love stories, long books, and titles (hint: someone close to Katie says all her novels could be called Complicity). Stay tuned for Katie’s answer to the signature question, which takes listeners from to the farmlands of Avonlea to the mean streets of Chicago.
Mentioned in this episode
By Katie Kitamura:

Intimacies

A Separation

Gone to the Forest

Japanese for Travelers

The Longshot

Also mentioned:

Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy


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Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly makes time for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and ND host John Plotz. She reads from The Wren, The Wren (Norton, 2023) and discusses the “etherized” state of our inner lives as they circulate on social media. Anne says we don't yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority, but that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”--though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos...is not as interested in your period as you might think.”
Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also gently corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they're "just Irish." Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want--while simultaneously “mortifying them...condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.”
Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to the signature question: A. A. Milne’s Now We are Six.
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Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.
Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be" )--as well as the protagonist's temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why "auto-fiction" strikes her as a "bad category" and "a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally" since "the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience."
Sheila’s response to the signature question was both textual and hilarious. A true writer's weirdness!
Mentioned in this Episode:
By Sheila Heti:

Pure Colour

How Should a Person Be?

Alphabetical Diaries

Ticknor


We Need a Horse (children's book)


The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman)


Also mentioned:

Oulipo Group


Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard


Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael


George Eliot, Middlemarch



Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star)

Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy


Willa Cather , The Professor's House


William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble.



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