The Cosmic Library

Here, in the first episode of The Cosmic Library’s new season, we start with our radio-play adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The play is read for you by people who make fictions—two novelists and a radio host—who will then talk about the novel (and more!) throughout this five-episode miniseries. The Brothers Karamazov is a story of deeply felt philosophical questions, a family drama, a polyphonic experience of nineteenth-century Russia, and a murder mystery. This all swirls around three siblings, sons of the murdered Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. In this radio play, we pick up on the following quality of the Karamazovs: the brothers are all, in a way, literary makers. The rationalist Ivan Karamazov writes a story, “The Grand Inquisitor,” that remains the book’s most famous passage; the distraught Dmitri Karamazov speaks at times in the manner of lyrical Romanticism; and the religious Alyosha delivers a rhetorically powerful speech to conclude the novel (and this radio play).  We find other similarities between the brothers, too: as the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg says, “It’s like a Charlie Kaufman novel,” in which separations and distinctions collapse. He says, “As you go further and further on, it’s like they all have bits of each other mixed in, they’re all sort of one thing.” Here, Hallberg will play Dmitri; the novelist Andrew Martin is Ivan; and the WFMU radio host Hearty White is our Alyosha.  Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library: Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel   Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Here it is: the trailer for season six of The Cosmic Library, which comes out this month. It’s "Karamazov Season," which means this five-episode miniseries will go into and beyond The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Sigmund Freud called it “the most magnificent novel ever,” and it contains so much—a murder mystery, philosophical conundrums, mathematical contemplation, and transformative scenes of ecstasy. For that reason, this miniseries will also contain so much. The first episode will include a radio play adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel, in which the parts of the three central brothers will be read by people who create fiction. Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire, will read the part of Dmitri Karamazov; Andrew Martin, author of Cool for America, will read the part of Ivan Karamazov; and WFMU host Hearty White is our Alyosha Karamazov. After the play, the conversations begin. The novelists reflect on their own writing along with Dostoevsky’s; Hearty White connects cinema with radio with literature; scholars Robin Feuer Miller and Katherine Bowers consider the life of Dostoevsky and his novel; and the mathematician Paulina Rowińska guides us through the logical and mathematical questions prompted by this book of conflicting and converging thoughts. It’s a season about frenzied doubts and discoveries, about philosophical intensity and weird dreams, about mathematical questions and literary surprise. Find it this spring at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The word “story” often comes after the word “bedtime,” and for good reason. Stories can frighten us, disturb and shock us, prompt us to change our thinking, but compared to most experiences, reading a story is tranquil. Podcasts, similarly conveying mediated encounters with other lives, are also used as sleep aids (there’s a “sleep” category in Apple Podcasts). Story podcasts, then, can demonstrate powerfully the connections between fiction and sleep. This episode—the concluding episode of The Cosmic Library’s season on the short story in the U.S.—examines those connections.Deborah Treisman says in this episode, of the observation that her own New Yorker Fiction podcast can soothe its listeners, “When people say they use my podcast to fall asleep, it feels slightly insulting. But there is something about being read to, and we all really love it. And it takes us back to childhood, and it is soothing.”Fiction's capacity for tranquil transport isn’t about boredom, either. Stories vanquish boredom, taking audiences on adventures into something beyond their immediate experience. And often, stories don’t even reassure us. Andrew Kahn points out here that “with the short story, in a way the whole plot can come down to irony, which leaves a situation unresolved, open, something to think about rather than all tied up.”The calming effect and the strange openness of stories can have, it turns out, everything to do with each other. With some of the most ambitious literature, as Deborah Treisman says, “you are being taken somewhere else in the way that you are in dreams, and you have no option but to sort of respond to it as you would in a dream.”Guests:Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New YorkerBecca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too SmallJustin Taylor, author of RebootAndrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“If my college-age self, reading White Noise, had thought I would one day be discussing word placement with Don DeLillo, I would have had a heart attack,” Deborah Treisman says in this episode. Since those days, in her role as fiction editor at The New Yorker, she has indeed discussed word placement with Don DeLillo, whose stories include “Midnight in Dostoyevsky” and “The Itch.” Treisman has helped bring that kind of story to a wide audience—it’s all part of her work at the center of one of the major institutions in the history of American fiction. In this episode, then, we talk about The New Yorker and other forces sustaining short stories.As unruly and unclassifiable as short stories can be, they often live in some august realms: in The New Yorker, for example, or major MFA programs. And elite organizations tend not to do well with unruliness or unclassifiability. But when it comes to short stories, the great achievements of literary institutions have come from the pursuit rather than restriction of short fiction's possibilities. Those possibilities are frequently found far from the publishing industry's hubs: Tayari Jones describes, for instance, how writers can do their best work by leaving the publishing capital of New York City for home, wherever it may be (Atlanta, in her case).Thriving U.S. institutions with a commitment to short stories all rely, in some way, on voices and tendencies beyond those institutions. The New Yorker, says the literary scholar Andrew Kahn, “for a long time has had a very, very diverse and interesting and jumbled-up catalog.” And the writer Justin Taylor says, of MFA programs, “the institutions are not the ivory towers they think they are. They're deeply reflective of the cultures that are producing them.” Guests:Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New YorkerTayari Jones, author of An American MarriageBecca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too SmallJustin Taylor, author of RebootAndrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

American short stories started out weird. Consider Nathaniel Hawthorne, as we just did in episode two this season—or, consider Edgar Allan Poe. Existential strangeness and cosmic peril pervade these nineteenth-century stories, and those moods have stayed with American short stories into the twenty-first century.Brevity can be crucial for such stories' maximal, cosmic weirdness. Justin Taylor points out here how Poe can get to extremity simply in a sentence. "What Poe brings to the table," Taylor says, "is that extreme purpleness of language, that kind of humidity, that really baroque Poe sentence, where it's kind of overwrought and maybe a little silly at times, but it's also really finely controlled."And Becca Rothfeld explains in this episode how short stories themselves aren't inherently contained, minimalist projects. A story, she tells us, “can resist ending by resisting presenting a satisfying or tidy conclusion," thereby inclining the reader toward something messy, something beyond, something expansive.Brevity might also express all that we can about overwhelming sublimity, in any case. Andrew Kahn quotes an essayist, writing on the centenary of Poe’s birth, who observed how Poe “understood that the story of horror must be short, because he knew that the illusion of sheer marvel cannot be long sustained.”Guests:Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New YorkerAndrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short IntroductionBecca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too SmallJustin Taylor, author of RebootMax Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s time for a story. In this episode of our season on short stories in the United States, you'll hear Nathaniel Hawthorne’s mysterious short story “Wakefield,” read by the actor Max Gordon Moore. It’s a story from the 1830s, reflecting from the first sentence the early American interest in strange information found repeatedly in periodicals, and then it follows that strangeness to cosmic extremes.If you know Hawthorne mostly as the author of The Scarlet Letter, you're in for a surprise in this story about a guy who moves basically next door and hides for twenty years. Short stories are good at this kind of surprise, too. They can be vehicles for writers to explore especially unusual material, and Hawthorne pursued that exploration with something like baroque concision. The novelist Justin Taylor says, of Hawthorne the writer of short stories, “When he was good, he was so good.”Max Gordon Moore reflects on the especially active thinking that Hawthorne's story stirs up: “I find myself perplexed in a fun way,” he says. As Deborah Treisman mentions in this episode, of effective short stories in general, “If the reader has to do some work, the reader becomes implicated in the story. If you’re immersed in it, you’ve gone somewhere, you’ve been part of it, and then it’s going to stay with you.”Guests:Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New YorkerBecca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too SmallJustin Taylor, author of RebootMax Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Cosmic Library has always followed notions, tangents, and moods prompted by books that can never be neatly summarized or simply decoded. This new season is no exception. Still, there's a difference: we're prompted now by more than one major work. In season five, we're talking about short stories in the United States.You’ll hear from New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, the novelist Tayari Jones, Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld, the writer Justin Taylor, the Oxford scholar of short stories Andrew Kahn, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. And you’ll hear a reading of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story that will add an exciting new dimension to your reality.Deborah Treisman in this first episode clarifies both the challenge and the promise of our subject. She says, “The term itself, 'American short story,' is slightly problematic, just because there are so many people in the U.S. writing short stories who perhaps came from somewhere else, who have a different heritage, whatever else it is—they're not playing into this tradition of Updike and Cheever and so on." Short stories in the United States tell us something way beyond any straightforward national narrative. "What's around right now is such multiplicity," Treisman says, "that it's rare to find a story that you would think of as classically American.”Contemplating multiplicity is part of the mission here in season five. We're talking about expansive range, about the uncontainable proliferation sustained by brevity. Short fiction, it turns out, can launch you into maximal excess just as novels can—and much more swiftly.Guests:Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New YorkerTayari Jones, author of An American MarriageBecca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too SmallJustin Taylor, author of RebootAndrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short IntroductionMax Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The trailer is here for the new season of The Cosmic Library! This five-episode season concerns a subject both smaller and vaster than any massive book, and that subject is: short stories in the United States.You’ll hear how short stories exceed their own brevity and meld with a reader’s mind; you’ll hear about the history of the short story across continents; you’ll hear how stories are edited at The New Yorker; and you’ll hear a thrilling reading of the cosmically bewildering “Wakefield,” a classic story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which this guy moves next door and hides out for twenty years. Guests include The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Oxford scholar Andrew Kahn, Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld, the novelist (and writer of short stories) Justin Taylor, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. Find it at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts—new episodes will be released weekly, starting April 24th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Here, in the conclusion of our five-episode season on The Hall of the Monkey King, you’ll hear about Journey to the West’s capacity for reinvention across centuries—about, in other words, its openness to different circumstances, something like the Monkey King's own openness, his playfulness.Julia Lovell says, “Running through Monkey's actions and personality is a love of this thing called play. He's an incredibly playful character. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Chinese word in the title of the novel that is translated as 'journey'—you—can also be translated as 'play.'"Kaiser Kuo describes the history of openness in China with regard to cosmopolitanism. He mentions the echoes between the Ming Dynasty (when Journey to the West was written) and the Tang Dynasty (when the novel is set). Both of those dynasties, he says, have "periods of outward-facing and inward-facing.” These are times of intensified tensions that Kaiser Kuo observes here across Chinese history.Journey to the West makes much of related dynamics between outward-facing and inward-facing, especially through its playful mood. In this novel, adventuring through traditions from China and from outside China, thinking in different keys, leaping from philosophy to philosophy, and seeking transcendence all depend upon a wild amount of play, of experiment, of fun.Guests this season include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of Chinese literature at Harvard; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; and Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can encounter Journey to the West in film, on television, in comic books—it’s a sixteenth-century novel that lives comfortably in an age of cinema and video games. This episode, then, follows a tangent away from the sixteenth century and into the movies. We’re talking about heroic quests and martial arts in media centuries after Journey to the West’s publication.Wuxia cinema, in particular, occupies our attention here. These are films of high drama and martial arts in pre-modern, legendary Chinese settings. Karen Fang, scholar of cinema and literature at the University of Houston, notes “threads of connection” between Journey to the West and wuxia, and connections include the similar presence of a spiritual quest and martial artistry in a mythical-historical world. Still, to be clear: in this installment, we’re going for a walk away from the novel and into the movies. It’s just that we find a few patterns that match those of the Monkey King’s adventures. Wuxia stories, like the Monkey King’s, draw from dynamics between intense self-cultivation and power struggle. The result is a durable kind of kinetic drama—it’s opened up cinematic possibilities for decades. Karen Fang explains the heart of it all: “The underlying idea in wuxia is this idea that somebody can reach a level of human transcendency—a transcendent power, a transcendent skill—through years of training and dedication, both to physical training, but also spiritual dedication.”Guests in this episode include Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; and Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.