Jennifer Egan and Terese Svoboda on Ghosts, Genre, and ‘Dog on Fire’

Terese Svoboda has been a powerhouse of literary production in recent years, publishing five books since 2018, and partaking of a formidable array of genres and approaches. Dog on Fire is structured as an oppositional narrative duet between two bereaved women—the sister and lover of a young man who struggled with epilepsy—who remember and imagine his life and speculate about his unexplained death. The brief novel also touches on ghosts, aliens, and the possibility of foul play, all testament to Svoboda’s inventive eclecticism. Svoboda was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about Dog on Fire and her wide-ranging writing career.

: At the center of  is the unexplained death of a young man whose life was shaped, in large part, by his acute epilepsy. Yet his “illness” seems also to endow him