The novel, however one defines it, is at least four hundred years old—and perhaps, depending on how one delimits its formal parameters, two millennia old. We could date the form to Don Quixote (1605) or, if we count fictions written prior to the printing press, to Mediterranean texts from the early first millennium like Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirrhoe and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. The novel has survived countless cultural, technological, and historical mutations; novels have been made by handpresses and electronic presses, printed on rag paper and on screens, made available by fixed type and by audiobooks downloaded to a phone. The form has proliferated into subgenres and categories as countless and varied as a continent’s fauna. In a moment when artistic genres and media seem to change at an ever-accelerating pace, the survival of the novel poses a few questions. What does the novel still do for us? What, if anything, is distinct about the pleasures it offers, or the intellectual challenges it poses? In the age of Twitter, TikTok, and streaming TV, why are people still turning to lengthy prose narratives that require prolonged focus and deep attention?
Our second podcast season, Public Books 101: The Novel Now, has turned to novelists, scholars of the novel, and thinkers about the narrative arts who also practice medicine to ponder what the form might still offer readers in the early 21st century. Across five episodes our host, Nicholas Dames, and 10 guests have addressed questions such as: How do novels help us engage and evaluate ideas that would be difficult or even dangerous to encounter in, say, a conversation or a written argument? Do novels illuminate the power structures that shape our lives, or do they tend to numb us to the political challenges we face? Can a novel meaningfully help us understand the pain that we and others endure, or does reading fiction inspire little more than navel-gazing and voyeurism?
The rationales our guests provided for the novel’s continuing cultural role were varied. In episode 1, Teju Cole spoke of “the novel as a space for moral seriousness, … an opportunity to smuggle into the ‘mainstream’ ideas that are at risk of remaining forever in [nonfiction] books.” In episode 2, Elif Batuman remarked that the novel is one of our last remaining art forms in which we can watch “one subjectivity at play”; and in episode 4, Heidi Julavits spoke of its capacity to alter our cognition, because novels force our brains to move at a speed that is usefully out of step with the swiftness that other media demand. In each episode our guests wrestled with the paradox that reading novels seems both essential and yet just one option among many ways to spend our time. Our guests also wondered whether the form has stagnated because of market demands, or whether pressures from other media have led its practitioners to innovate in recent decades in order to remain vital.
The following reading list is divided into five parts, each corresponding to the podcast episode that inspired it. Each part of the list includes writing by our guests, books and articles that our guests and Public Books editors recommended, and links to relevant articles—in Public Books and elsewhere—that contribute to, and complicate further, the questions at hand. This list is intended as a spur for further exploration by anyone who found themselves captivated by the themes a given episode raised, and also as a resource for teachers who might be interested in using the podcast—or might be teaching novels more generally—in their courses.
What follows is only a very partial selection of ideas about the capacities and shapes of the novel across time, with an anglophone focus that certainly does not reflect the scope of novel writing, and writing about novels, across the world. Each separate list displays some of the varied ways in which writers and scholars have thought about this old—yet stubbornly persistent—artistic form.
We thank our podcast guests—Jay Baruch, Elif Batuman, Teju Cole, Merve Emre, Rishi Goyal, Garth Greenwell, Heidi Julavits, Tara Menon, Leah Price, and Daniel Wright—as well as some of our Public Books colleagues—Liz Bowen, Jesse McCarthy, and Bécquer Seguín—for their suggestions.
Listen to the Podcast:
You can also listen and subscribe to Public Books 101 in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts.
Part 1: Novels and Ideas
How do novels provoke readers to wrestle with complex, even dangerous ideas? How can reading fiction help us think more ethically about the world we inhabit?
Books
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
- J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003), The Lives of Animals (2016)
- Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), Open City (2012)
- Shūsaku Endō, Silence (1966)
- William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
- William Godwin, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)
- Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)
- Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution (Pluto, 2020)
- Jeanne-Marie Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas (2021)
- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1928)
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
- John Milton, Areopagitica and Other Writings (1644)
- Pankaj Mishra, Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire (2020)
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
- Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (1930–43)
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
- Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1966)
- Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
- Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf, 2017)
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
- Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798)
Essays
- Derek Attridge, “The South African Novel Today,” Public Books, February 7, 2017
- Nicholas Dames, “The Theory Generation,” n+1, no. 14 (2012)
- Mark McGurl, “The Novel’s Forking Path,” Public Books, April 1, 2015
- Tara Menon, “Sara Moss’s Anxiety Chronicles,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 21, 2021
- Tara Menon, “What Women Want,” Public Books, June 24, 2020
- Sianne Ngai, “The Gimmick of the Novel of Ideas,” Paris Review Daily, June 25, 2020
- Namwali Serpell, “The Banality of Empathy,” New York Review of Books, March 2, 2019
- Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008
- James Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman,” New Republic, July 24, 2000
Podcast Episode
Novelist Teju Cole and scholar Tara K. Menon join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels like J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello render complex ideas into fiction.
Learn more about Teju, Tara, and the episode here. Listen to the episode:
You can also listen and subscribe to Public Books 101 on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. View a transcript of the episode here.
Part 2: Novels and Political Consciousness
The novel may be the best technology we have for transmitting human consciousness. But novels like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina don’t just give us a window into characters’ suffering minds. They also turn pain and oppression into beautiful literary prose. How does reading novels affect our understanding of the world we live in and the power dynamics that shape our lives? How does the venerated genre of the bildungsroman hold up in the 21st century?
Books
- Elif Batuman, The Idiot (2017)
- Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988)
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
- Shulamith Firestone, Airless Spaces (1998), The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)
- Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869)
- Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (1990)
- Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (1916)
- Sakaya Murata, Convenience Store Woman (2016)
- Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)
- Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero (1975)
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
- Justin Torres, We the Animals (2011)
- Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936)
- John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am (1967)
Essays
- Maggie Doherty, “Elif Batuman’s Apprenticeship,” Public Books, April 14, 2017
- Merve Emre, “Dismembered, Relocated, Rearranged,” New York Review of Books, June 6, 2019
- Lucy Ives, “Orphans of Dickens,” The Baffler, no. 44 (2019)
- Kent Puckett, “Why Nixon is Tricky for Novelists,” Public Books, May 24, 2017
- Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs, vol. 5, no. 4 (1980)
- Salamishah Tillet, “Free Is and Free Ain’t,” Public Books, February 10, 2017
Podcast Episode
Novelist Elif Batuman and scholar Merve Emre join our host, Nicholas Dames, to debate whether novels depoliticize us or whether novels like Sakaya Murata’s Convenience Store Woman can show readers what a life of freedom could look like.
Learn more about Elif, Merve, and the episode here. Listen to the episode:
You can also listen and subscribe to Public Books 101 on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. View a transcript of the episode here.
Part 3: Novels and Intimacy
With the rise of webcams, smartphones, texting, and video-call software, human intimacy can now take many forms: not just between bodies together in a space but also between pixelated faces on a video chat or images exchanged online. Intimacy, like so much else, has gone digital. But novels have always reminded us that bodies are embodied by thinking, feeling subjects. How can reading novels in an image-saturated culture expand our understanding of sex and intimacy?
Books
- Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016)
- James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Another Country (1962), Just Above My Head (1979)
- Barbara Browning, The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body) (2017)
- Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009)
- Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (2016), Cleanness (2020)
- Claire Jarvis, Exquisite Masochism: Marriage, Sex, and the Novel Form (2016)
- Yasunari Kawabata, House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961)
- Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (1997)
- Dana Seitler, Reading Sideways: The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction (2019)
- Daniel Wright, Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel (2018)
- Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children (2015)
- jia qing wilson-yang, Small Beauty (2016)
- Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (1993)
Essays and Poem
- Claire Jarvis, “The Sweet Stuff,” Post45, June 15, 2020
- Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978)
- Michael Lucey, “Sexuality, Counterfactually,” Public Books, December 1, 2015
- Mark McGurl, “Feeling Like the Internet,” Public Books, January 30, 2017
- Christina Rosetti, “Goblin Market” (1862)
- Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (1984)
- Namwali Serpell, “Black Hole,” New York Review of Books, March 26, 2021
- Daniel Wright, “Greenwell’s Cleanness: From Debt to Care,” Public Books, June 2, 2020
Podcast Episode
Novelist Garth Greenwell and scholar Daniel Wright join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels like Barbara Browning’s The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body) expand our understanding of sex and intimacy in the digital age.
Learn more about Garth, Daniel, and the episode here. Listen to the episode:
You can also listen and subscribe to Public Books 101 on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. View a transcript of the episode here.
Part 4: Novels, Capitalism, and Catastrophe
Between the end of the Trump presidency and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic, people across the globe are reeling from what feel like overlapping ruptures in historical time. All the while, daily routines and rituals continue to give life some degree of predictable regularity. It can be disorienting to constantly shift focus between mundane and world-historical events.
With their ability to traverse time and to zoom in and out between individual and collective experience, novels have often helped readers see the present in a broader historical perspective. How can fiction make connections between everyday working life and the larger structures of capitalism?
Books
- Aravind Adiga, White Tiger (2008)
- Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001)
- Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (2018)
- Sarah Brouillete, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019)
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
- Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (2010)
- George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)
- Raven Leilani, Luster (2020)
- Sheila Liming, Office (2020)
- Ling Ma, Severance (2018)
- The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (2009)
- Sigrid Nunez, Salvation City (2010)
- Ed Park, Personal Days (2008)
- Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (2014)
- Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
Essays
- Jasper Bernes, “Character, Genre, Labor: The Office Novel after Deindustrialization,” Post45, January 10, 2019
- Emily Bloom, “Mother of a Pandemic,” Public Books, February 10, 2021
- Anna E. Clark, “The Novel in the Age of Digital Diversion,” Public Books, April 15, 2016
- Siddhartha Deb, “Accessorized for the Apocalypse,” The Baffler, March 13, 2017
- Cluster on Severance, edited by Jane Hu and Anjuli Raza, Post45 (2020)
- Eve Zelickson, “The Once and Future Temp,” Public Books, September 7, 2020
Podcast Episode
Novelist Heidi Julavits and scholar Leah Price join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels like Ling Ma’s Severance represent the strange era we are currently living through.
Learn more about Heidi, Leah, and the episode here. Listen to the episode:
You can also listen and subscribe to Public Books 101 on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. View a transcript of the episode here.
Part 5: Novels and Medicine
From Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch (1871) to the carers in Never Let Me Go (2005), fictional characters have given writers and readers a lens for exploring the complexities of medical practice. How does narrative affect the way doctors treat patients? And how can reading novels help both medical providers and patients navigate the “narrative disaster zone” of spaces like the ER or the clinic?
Books
- Mikhail Bulgakov, A Young Doctor’s Notebook (1925)
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
- Leonora Carrington, Down Below (1972)
- George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
- Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1995)
- Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1901)
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
- Aleksander Luria, The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound (1972)
- Tom McCarthy, Remainder (2005)
- Toni Morrison, Home (2012)
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)
- Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004)
- Oliver Saks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And other Clinical Tales (1985)
- Sarah Schulman, Rat Bohemia (1995)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
- Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)
- Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2007)
- Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)
Essays
- Liz Bowen, “‘I Can’t Make You See What I See’: Talking with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and Jesse Rice-Evans,” Public Books, April 27, 2020
- Jared Gardner, “Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 1,” Public Books, November 15, 2015
- Claire Jarvis, “Birth of a Mother,” Public Books, July 16, 2018
- Marco Roth, “The Rise of the Neuronovel,” n+1, no. 8 (2009)
Podcast Episode
Two emergency-room physicians, Dr. Jay Baruch and Dr. Rishi Goyal, join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go can inform the practice and ethics of medicine.
Learn more about Jay, Rishi, and the episode here. Listen to the episode:
You can also listen and subscribe to Public Books 101 on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. View a transcript of the episode here.
This season was produced by Annie Galvin and is licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0). 
