All of that, though, only prepared the ground for The Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.
In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John 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.”
In this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them?
Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel.
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 Science Fictional Universe (2010). That novel brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. In this crossover episode, which originally aired on Novel Dialogue, where critics and novelists sit down together in peace, He speaks with John and with science-fiction scholar Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine.
This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. (If you want to hear more, RtB 53 featured Nobel Orhan Pamuk, RtB 54 brought in Helen Garner, and in RtB 72 we haveCaryl Phillips). Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan–prolific and prize-winning American novelist–than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread.
Crossover Month continues with a scintillating Australian fiction episode from Novel Dialogue, a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher.
Crossover Month continues with something completely different, and only a little bit incestuous. Novel Dialogue is a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. John and Aarthi serve as the third wheel (or if you prefer the social lubricant) for a scholar and a novelist who sit down each week to explore the making of novels, and what to make of them. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts Spotify or Stitcher
Recall This Book 