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. Learn more about Novel Dialogue here.
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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. Learn more about Novel Dialogue here.
During a desert thunderstorm outside Tucson, Lydia Millet joined the Novel Dialogue conversation with hosts John Plotz and Emily Hyde, with Emily playing the role of critic. Lydia—author more than a dozen novels and story collections and recently the nonfictional We Loved it All (Norton, 2024)—also works at the Center for Biological Diversity. Wild creatures gambol, flap, swim, and crawl their way through her writing and her conversation: we begin in the Garden of Eden but quickly learn that for Lydia human exceptionalism is the original sin, one that continues to bedevil us in “the nuclear era” (or did she say error?). As thunder cracks overhead, she muses on salvation in an exhausted world and the busy lives of Gambel’s Quail. In her recent novels, Lydia has worked to balance the intensely personal with our more communal aspirations: without gossip, she wonders, how do you avoid polemic and the maudlin? Emily praises Lydia’s humor and asks us to consider how a joke—the earnest set-up followed by a sudden deflation—can reconcile our fears and hopes for the future, the daily here-and-now with the magnificent unknowability of the world. Is it humor, comedy, satire, wit? Lydia is “just trying make myself laugh.” She worries, in her life as well as in her writing, about the BS impulse to pretend everything’s ok inside “this emergency, this critical life support dilemma.” We also learn that Lydia will never write historical fiction, despite having a tantalizing family connection to Mark Twain.
Mentions:
Lydia Millet, We Loved it All (2024), A Children’s Bible (2020), Mermaids in Paradise (2014), Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005)
Center for Biological Diversity
Gambel’s quail
Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard: the three nuclear scientists who vanish from 1945 only to appear in 2003 in Millet’s novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Rachel Carson
Elizabeth Kolbert
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
Oscar Wilde
Mark Twain
Francis Millet and Archibald Butts
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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. Learn more about Novel Dialogue here.
