SUCCESS: The Cosmic Library’s season on short stories in the U.S. is complete. That brings the show to five volumes—each of five episodes—on some of the most intense literary experiences imaginable. Listen to all five episodes of our short story season now, wherever you go for podcasts or over at Lit Hub.
In this season’s conclusion, New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman concisely explains the association between literary adventure and sleepiness. There can be an “otherworldly” quality to our reading, she tells us:
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.
Episode three this season considers otherworldliness in short fiction—specifically in weird fiction. Episode four deals with the unruliness of short stories within even the elite institutions that bring short stories to the world. So it seems right to conclude with Deborah Treisman’s statement on how fiction can run off with our minds.
I think the first podcast I ever heard was Treisman’s New Yorker Fiction podcast. Her show has always been an inspiration for me, and I wanted this concluding episode to answer some questions of my own about what it means to make Treismanian podcasts, by which I mean literary podcasts. The answer—or, my tentative answer: literary podcasts can offer a dreamy (dreamier?) version of printed literature’s already-dreamlike experience.
Really, I don’t know if I can make a grand statement on what podcasting-as-literature means. But I do know that The Cosmic Library will be back. In the meantime, please recommend people listen to The Cosmic Library whenever you’re in a gathering and everyone starts talking about podcasts, or even TV, or music, or sports.
Thank you!