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The Cosmic Library

By: Adam Colman
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  • Summary

  • The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three journeyed through and beyond the Hebrew Bible. In season four, we considered Journey to the West. For season five, we talk about a kind of writing that's filled many massive books: the American short story.
    2021 Adam Colman
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Episodes
  • 5.2 Wake Up with Wakefield

    5.2 Wake Up with Wakefield
    May 1 2024
    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 Yorker Becca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too Small Justin Taylor, author of Reboot Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    38 mins
  • 5.1 Introduction

    5.1 Introduction
    Apr 24 2024
    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 Yorker Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage Becca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too Small Justin Taylor, author of Reboot Andrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    30 mins
  • Season 5 Trailer: The Short Story in the United States

    Season 5 Trailer: The Short Story in the United States
    Apr 3 2024
    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/adchoices
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    3 mins
Art Literary History & Criticism
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