A Conversation with Laila Lalami on The Dream Hotel: dreaming beyond the algorithmic state

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with award-winning novelist Laila Lalami about her new novel, The Dream Hotel. What happens when the state, with the pretext of protecting public safety, can detain indefinitely certain individuals whose dreams seem to indicate they may be capable of committing a crime?  Set in a precarious world where sleep-enhancing devices and algorithms provide the tools and formulae for making one’s unconscious a witness to one’s possible waking life, this novel touches on a myriad of political, philosophical, and moral concerns as they particularly connect to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, privacy, and  the security state.

Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times.  She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.  She lives in Los Angeles.