Five Strange Languages: James Elkins on Long Novels, Memory, and the Art of Digression
A deep dive with James Elkins
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
Lori, Thanks for sharing that conversation. You & James helped me to prepare for summer. While you talked I hung the lights and the ceiling fan in my garden reading gazebo where I'll spend the rest of the day, probably with Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. I was traveling last April when I came across MMMD in a bookstore and I spent next few evening reading it. After reading the first four chapters, I said to my son, Let the French have their Proust, we have Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. I've read two English translations of Proust and as much as I can in the original, so I certainly love reading Proust. But (so far, for now) MMMD is where I'd prefer to spend my time. Looking forward to your future chat with James about long books in general.