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Five Strange Languages: James Elkins on Long Novels, Memory, and the Art of Digression
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In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori Feathers sits down with art historian, theorist, and novelist James Elkins to discuss his new book A Short Introduction to Anneliese published by Unnamed Press—the second novel in his five-volume literary experiment, Five Strange Languages.
James shares the 20-year journey behind this sprawling, genre-defying project, its dizzying structure, overlapping timelines, and why his fictional characters come with charts, graphs, footnotes, and even musical scores.
Lori and James dive deep into big questions: What makes a long novel worthwhile? What does it mean to forget your younger self? Can emotion survive in a highly structured novel? Is complexity the goal—or the undoing—of the epic form?
From Sebald to Stockhausen, Darwin to Ducks, Newburyport, this is a conversation for readers who love books that break form, test memory, and defy easy classification.
If you’ve ever wept in front of a painting, lost patience with Proust, or believe you could be charmed by a neurotic biologist surrounded by 120 unread notebooks, this one’s for you.
Connect with James:
jameselkins.com
A hub for his published books, essays, art criticism, upcoming projects, and course materials.
The Big Book Project Links:
Chapters
00:00 – Welcome + Introducing James Elkins
01:00 – What is A Short Introduction to Anneliese?
02:00 – Structuring a 5-Volume Novel Overlapping in Time
05:00 – A Character Who Writes Thousands of Pages Alone
08:00 – Musical Memory and the Role of Stockhausen
12:00 – Letting Visuals Speak in Fiction
14:00 – The Art of Illegible Notebooks and Fictional Archives
18:00 – Creating the Character of Anneliese
21:00 – Long Novels, Insanity, and Summer Reading Lists
24:00 – Philip K. Dick, Earthworms, and Other Mad Texts
26:30 – Does Any Big Book Really Stay in Control?
28:30 – Ducks, Digressions, and Structural Drift
30:00 – Does Constraint Kill Emotion in Fiction?
33:00 – Organizing Chaos: Making Anneliese Sympathetic
35:00 – Sculpting Disorder: Anneliese's Aesthetic Philosophy
37:00 – The Next Volumes in the Five Strange Languages Project
40:00 – Crying in Front of Paintings: James on Emotional Art
43:00 – Social Isolation, Survival, and Solipsism
44:30 – Obituaries and the Final Volume of the Series
45:30 – Reading Order and Easter Eggs Across the Series
46:30 – The Emotional Life of Difficult Characters
48:00 – A Call for More Conversations on Long Novels
51:00 – Digressions, Detail, and the Limits of Beauty
53:00 – On John Fosse, Acrostic Writing, and Descriptive Gaps
54:00 – Wrapping Up + Future Conversations Ahead
12 episodes
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