Best John Plotz Podcasts (2025)

1
9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP) 50:52

10d ago50:52

50:52

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 his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established a conceptual space a…

1
9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper 49:01

25d ago49:01

49:01

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 generative source of imaginative chaos? Few are as qualified to address these questions as Lauren Beukes, whose simultaneous embrace of genres from science fiction to crime to horror and refusal to abide with…

1
9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW) 48:25

1M ago48:25

48:25

It’s a bit surprising to hear a writer known for building worlds that incorporate deep historical research and elaborate technological details extol the virtues of play, but Ken Liu tells critic Rose Casey and host Sarah Wasserman that if “your idea of heaven doesn’t include play, then I’m not sure it’s a heaven people want to go to.” It turns out …

1
9 Trailer Writing Against the System 34:10

2M ago34:10

34:10

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 co-producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Aarthi about the role of the novel in relation to the mass writing platforms that dominate our digital lives. Aarthi is at work on a book called We the Pla…

1
8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries” 52:16

5M ago52:16

52:16

Eighteenth century prison break artist and folk hero Jack Sheppard is among history’s most frequently adapted rogues: his exploits have inspired Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Bertolt Brecht, and most recently, Jordy Rosenberg, whose first novel, Confessions of the Fox (2018), rewrites Sheppard as a trans man and Sheppard’s partner Bess as a South Asian l…

1
8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde 53:24

5M ago53:24

53:24

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…

1
8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV) 44:25

6M ago44:25

44:25

Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the U.S. army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar and…

1
8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP) 30:20

6M ago30:20

30:20

What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Mad…

1
8.2 To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW) 48:11

6M ago48:11

48:11

An unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward failure and the limitations of language that Akbar discusses with critic Pardis Dabashi. In their conversation, Kaveh considers writing both as an escape from the confines of the self and as a vehicle for expr…

1
8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH) 48:18

7M ago48:18

48:18

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 form of a bildungsroman? This conversation between Lydia Kiesling and Megan Ward takes up questions of form and political consciousness in the novel, globality and rootedness, capitalism and the yearning…

1
7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH) 50:01

11M ago50:01

50:01

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 Sarah Manguso and Tess McNulty takes up questions of writing and veracity, trauma and memory. Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including three memoirs. Her first novel, Very Cold People, was n…

1
7.5 Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH) 50:15

11M ago50:15

50:15

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, a…

1
7.4 Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song 53:37

12M ago53:37

53:37

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 nov…

1
7.3 What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH) 47:41

12M ago47:41

47:41

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 st…

1
7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW) 58:53

1y ago58:53

58:53

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 th…

1
7.1 Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds (JP) 41:58

1y ago41:58

41:58

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 author…

1
6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff 44:24

1+ y ago44:24

44:24

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 theolog…

1
6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath (SW) 48:31

1+ y ago48:31

48:31

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 Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff sat down to talk to critic Laura McGrath and host Sarah Wasserman. Although Groff admits that she wants “each subsequent book to destroy the one” that came before,…

1
6.4 “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias” 46:11

1+ y ago46:11

46:11

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, an uproarious murder mystery set amid the tragedies of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Its protagonist, a war photographer, has become a ghost with just seven moons to find his killer and give his life’s…

1
6.3 Narrative, Database, Archive: Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch (AV) 41:20

1+ y ago41:20

41:20

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 English literary tradition. It has no human characters, no original writing, and it is astoundingly good! Tom sits down with distinguished Harvard prof, Deidre Lynch and host Aarthi Vadde to talk about…

1
6.2 What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington 39:14

1+ y ago39:14

39:14

Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard for a conversation about the archives, methods, and cosmologies that inform his speculative fiction. Clark’s fiction blends fantasy and horror elements with richly drawn historical worlds that speak to his academic life as a …

1
6.1 Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling (CH) 41:28

1+ y ago41:28

41:28

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 the modernist weird, Alison Sperling (FSU). With ND host Chris Holmes, Jeff and Alison delve into how the ugly politics of Lovecraft’s “old” weird gives rise to the stylistic panoply of the New Weird…

1
Weirding Out with Kate Marshall 24:26

1+ y ago24:26

24:26

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 Century. Hosts and producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Kate about the pulpy literary history of weird tales and learn how in the 21st-century weirdness emerges as both genre and mood. The conversati…

1
5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto (AV) 43:50

2y ago43:50

43:50

Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Born in Sierra Leone, Aminatta is of Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led he…

1
5.5 They’re Not Metaphorical Demons: Mariana Enriquez and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra 56:18

2y ago56:18

56:18

Booker Prize shortlister Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, joins Penn State professor Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra and host Chris Holmes to talk about her most recent novel, Our Share of Night, her first to be translated into English. Our Share of Night follows a spiritual medium, Juan, who can com…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

John Plotz Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

1
Novel Dialogue

Aarthi Vadde and John Plotz

1
9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP) 50:52

1
9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper 49:01

1
9.1 Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey (SW) 48:25

1
9 Trailer Writing Against the System 34:10

1
8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries” 52:16

1
8.5 And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde 53:24

1
8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV) 44:25

1
8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP) 30:20

1
8.2 To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW) 48:11

1
8.1 Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH) 48:18

1
7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH) 50:01

1
7.5 Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH) 50:15

1
7.4 Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song 53:37

1
7.3 What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH) 47:41

1
7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW) 58:53

1
7.1 Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds (JP) 41:58

1
6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff 44:24

1
6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath (SW) 48:31

1
6.4 “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias” 46:11

1
6.3 Narrative, Database, Archive: Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch (AV) 41:20

1
6.2 What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington 39:14

1
6.1 Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling (CH) 41:28

1
Weirding Out with Kate Marshall 24:26

1
5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto (AV) 43:50

1
5.5 They’re Not Metaphorical Demons: Mariana Enriquez and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra 56:18