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1 Eli Beer & United Hatzalah: Saving Lives in 90 seconds or Less 30:20
8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
Manage episode 448899046 series 3341617
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–Madison’s Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War.
Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann’s physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos.
- Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist
- Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer
- Italo Calvino,If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
- OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau
- Georges Perec’s most famous experiment is Life: A User’s Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”)
- Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..)
- Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola?
- Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story’s first sentence.
- Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they?
- Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene)
- The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
63 episodes
Manage episode 448899046 series 3341617
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–Madison’s Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War.
Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann’s physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos.
- Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist
- Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer
- Italo Calvino,If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
- OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau
- Georges Perec’s most famous experiment is Life: A User’s Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”)
- Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..)
- Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola?
- Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story’s first sentence.
- Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they?
- Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene)
- The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
63 episodes
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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 8.6 “I love a dialectical reader, and best is a dialectical reader who cries” 52:16

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 4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay 49:04

1 4.5a Novel Dialogue Bonus: Jean-Baptiste Naudy Reads from Claude McKay’s "Amiable with Big Teeth" 7:52

1 4.4 “A short, sharp punch to the face”: José Revueltas’ The Hole (El Apando) with Alia Trabucco Zerán and Sophie Hughes. 53:51

1 4.3 Strange Beasts of Translation: Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang in Conversation 50:21

1 4.2 Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah Quesada 32:27

1 4.1 “Sometimes I’m just a little disappointed in English” 59:19

1 4.0 Novel Dialogue Season 4: Transitions and Translations 11:58

1 3.6 Why are You in Bed? Why are You Drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in Conversation 46:05

1 3.5 The Romance of Recovery: Ben Bateman talks to Shola von Reinhold (AV) 37:09

1 3.4 The Work of Inhabiting a Role: Charles Yu speaks to Chris Fan (JP) 46:10

1 3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH) 41:02

1 3.2 Promises Unkept: Damon Galgut with Andrew van der Vlies 47:52

1 3.1 On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin Cheng 37:21


1 71 Jennifer Egan with Ivan Kreilkamp: Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal (Novel Dialogue crossover, JP) 37:03
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