In response to Dave Eggers’s new book, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live For Ever?, Alex Kalamaroff takes us on a guided tour of the “dialogue novel,” a genre where conversation between characters is “the primary or only means of narrative advancement.” Kalamaroff boils the genre down to three sub-categories. Within these, he argues, literary heavy hitters like Diderot, David Foster Wallace, Lauren Myracle, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and Italo Calvino, among others, make significant contributions to the discussion.
Next, Molly Sutton Kiefer reviews Jennifer Michael Hecht’s “romp” of a poetry collection, Who Said. Hecht uses cryptograms to interrogate the role of authority and ownership in literature. “There’s a fantastic attitude to the voice in these poems,” Kiefer writes, “a brassiness and up-front-ed-ness that is admirable,” but there is also “an incredibly serious and hopeful side.” This sweet and sour duality is exactly what we hope to find in a good conversation.
