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.comA hub for his published books, essays, art criticism, upcoming projects, and course materials.The Big Book Project Links:Apple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeInstagramChapters00:00 – Welcome + Introducing James Elkins01:00 – What is A Short Introduction to Anneliese?02:00 – Structuring a 5-Volume Novel Overlapping in Time05:00 – A Character Who Writes Thousands of Pages Alone08:00 – Musical Memory and the Role of Stockhausen12:00 – Letting Visuals Speak in Fiction14:00 – The Art of Illegible Notebooks and Fictional Archives18:00 – Creating the Character of Anneliese21:00 – Long Novels, Insanity, and Summer Reading Lists24:00 – Philip K. Dick, Earthworms, and Other Mad Texts26:30 – Does Any Big Book Really Stay in Control?28:30 – Ducks, Digressions, and Structural Drift30:00 – Does Constraint Kill Emotion in Fiction?33:00 – Organizing Chaos: Making Anneliese Sympathetic35:00 – Sculpting Disorder: Anneliese's Aesthetic Philosophy37:00 – The Next Volumes in the Five Strange Languages Project40:00 – Crying in Front of Paintings: James on Emotional Art43:00 – Social Isolation, Survival, and Solipsism44:30 – Obituaries and the Final Volume of the Series45:30 – Reading Order and Easter Eggs Across the Series46:30 – The Emotional Life of Difficult Characters48:00 – A Call for More Conversations on Long Novels51:00 – Digressions, Detail, and the Limits of Beauty53:00 – On John Fosse, Acrostic Writing, and Descriptive Gaps54:00 – Wrapping Up + Future Conversations Ahead

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