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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Art Literary History & Criticism
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Episodes
  • 5.5 The Short Story in the U.S.: Otherworldly Bedtime Stories

    5.5 The Short Story in the U.S.: Otherworldly Bedtime Stories
    May 22 2024
    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 Yorker 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    26 mins
  • 5.4 The Short Story in the U.S.: NYC+MFA+ATL

    5.4 The Short Story in the U.S.: NYC+MFA+ATL
    May 15 2024
    “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 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    37 mins
  • 5.3 The Short Story in the U.S.: It's Weird

    5.3 The Short Story in the U.S.: It's Weird
    May 8 2024
    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 Yorker Andrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction 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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    21 mins

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