The new season of The Cosmic Library starts this month. There’s a very short trailer here (thanks, as always, to Lit Hub). Our subject for this season (our fifth!) is no single text, but all short stories in the United States.
You’ll hear from New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, the novelist Tayari Jones, the Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld, the novelist Justin Taylor, the Oxford scholar of short stories Andrew Kahn, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. And, from our actor, you’ll hear a reading of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story that will add an exciting new dimension to your reality.
A note: The Cosmic Library is free, and it will always be free. Here’s one greatly and sincerely appreciated thing listeners can do for the show, however: tell everyone about it.
Post “Lit Hub’s Cosmic Library podcast will add an exciting new dimension your reality” with a link, on whatever social media platform isn’t in a shambles.
Quote the show relentlessly in conversation.
Gift idea: give people one of the books discussed in The Cosmic Library along with a link to the show. They will have not just a book, but imaginary friends with whom they can discuss that book forever. Note that if you actually do this, let me know, and I’ll suppress this from The Cosmic Library’s Substack record. It’ll be perfect, they’ll think you came up with the gift idea. (We look out for each other here in The Cosmic Library.)
Short Stories, United States
This season you will hear, in its entirety, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield,” read by the actor Max Gordon Moore. It’s a story full of contradictions and bafflements, all of which sustain musical language, which becomes powerfully evident in this performance. You’ll hear what I mean soon.
You’ll hear, too, from the scholar Andrew Kahn about the USA’s America-sized place in the history of the modern short story. You’ll learn from the Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld about short stories that speak to America-sized ideals of excess and decadent enjoyment. New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman will describe how the work of selecting and editing short stories at the New Yorker does indeed begin with reading for pleasure. The writer Justin Taylor describes how short stories lend themselves especially well to wild uncanniness. And the novelist Tayari Jones speaks about a crucial short-story writer who found something unexpected in American historical circumstances.
It’s a season about the overbrimming history that led to modern short stories, about the vastness that expresses itself in brevity, about how the greatest short stories exceed themselves. My hope is that the season exceeds itself, too.
Thank you for reading, thank you for listening, and stay alert for season five of The Cosmic Library.