By now, it's clear that The Brothers Karamazov sits comfortably on the shelf of books of infinity, books that can never be completed. It is, for one thing, only the first part of a plan Dostoevsky had for much more. But this novel also emphasizes incompleteness, drives toward potential rather than anything that might be perfectly established on the page. In episode four, we talked about incompleteness theorems, finding a mathematical dimension to some of our literary notions. And in The Brothers...
May 14, 2025•17 min•Season 6Ep. 5
In this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ve heard us discuss how Fyodor Dostoevsky's Karamazov brothers converge, even as they're on seemingly distinct tracks. And the novel directs attention to convergences in surprising ways: at one point, for example, Ivan Karamazov alludes to non-Euclidean geometry in which parallel lines meet—in which otherwise separate things join. It doesn't just happen mathematically, or philosophically: dreams, too, can bring the novel’s characters toward convergence. ...
May 07, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 4
In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky created his ultimate novel of ideas, with brothers Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha pursuing a range of philosophical, theological, and political arguments and questions even as a crime story takes shape. But there’s a shared, perplexing quality of all their grappling with ideas: they tend toward something beyond—beyond the conventions of routine debate and conversation. The novelist Andrew Martin says in this latest episode of The Cosmic Library's Karamazov...
Apr 30, 2025•23 min•Season 6Ep. 3
In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts ideas into motion, and into emotional conflict, with combustible results. The convictions he expressed in his nonfiction—religious convictions, for instance—join a mix that contains wildly different points of view, generating a book that encompasses more than the non-fictional Dostoevsky did. In this second episode of The Cosmic Library’s five-episode Karamazov season, we’re thinking about how that works. More broadly, we’re thinking about how fi...
Apr 23, 2025•42 min•Season 6Ep. 2
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 ...
Apr 16, 2025•48 min•Season 6Ep. 1
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...
Apr 02, 2025•3 min
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 C...
May 22, 2024•26 min•Season 5Ep. 5
“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...
May 15, 2024•37 min•Season 5Ep. 4
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," Taylo...
May 08, 2024•21 min•Season 5Ep. 3
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 thi...
May 01, 2024•38 min•Season 5Ep. 2
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 sh...
Apr 24, 2024•30 min•Season 5Ep. 1
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 c...
Apr 03, 2024•2 min•Season 5Ep. 1
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 t...
Jul 04, 2023•27 min•Season 4Ep. 5
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 ...
Jun 27, 2023•21 min•Season 4Ep. 4
You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King’s adventure through Daoist and Buddhist drama does have both elements, and the book weaves together multiple moods as result, including those of spiritual clarity and zany satirical play. Whether the novel does all this for the sake of ultimate, anarchic satire, for a livelier spirituality, or for other reasons: that all gets debated. Julia Lovell says in this epi...
Jun 20, 2023•29 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Different belief systems—and just differences in general—collide and merge in Journey to the West, the classic Chinese novel at the center of this season. “In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, you’ve got this lawful good monk and then you have this chaotic good monkey,” says Kaiser Kuo (co-founder of China's first heavy metal band and host of the Sinica Podcast) in this episode. And their quest succeeds: the combination of the monk Tripitaka's lawfulness and the Monkey King's chaos works out. ...
Jun 13, 2023•29 min•Season 4Ep. 2
The Cosmic Library is back, with a five-episode season on Journey to the West, the classic 16th-century Chinese novel of comic mischief, spirituality, bureaucratic maneuvers, and superpowered fight scenes. It’s the story of a monk’s journey west for Buddhist texts, and that journey is moved along by the rambunctious Monkey King, whose interests include troublemaking and the pursuit of immortality. In film, television, comic books, videogames, and elsewhere, this book remains in pop culture; for ...
Jun 06, 2023•22 min•Season 4Ep. 1
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, the Hebrew Bible. This spring, in a season titled "The Hall of the Monkey King," we're talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chi...
May 25, 2023•3 min
It's not just the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible that puzzle and provoke readers—there are, throughout, passages of intense emotional or moral provocation. See, for instance, Ecclesiastes, which in the King James translation begins: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. Ecclesiastes challenges ...
May 10, 2022•23 min•Season 3Ep. 5
From the book of Genesis on, the Hebrew Bible presents a struggle with language: a struggle to establish meaning, to figure out the right uses of words, to understand one's place in the world. The famous early scene of struggle in the Hebrew Bible, Jacob's wrestling match with the divine, goes as follows in the King James translation: Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of ...
May 03, 2022•23 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Stuck in a lonely motel room, you have a good chance of finding a Bible, left for anyone similarly stuck in a strange interval between days. In this way, it’s yet another night book. The Bible also has famous night scenes, and dream scenes, too: Jacob's dream of angels, Joseph's dream of sheaves of wheat. So this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic” explores dream interpretation and that foundational dream-interpreter Sigmund Freud, himself a close reader of the Hebrew Bible. "Literature guides Freud's th...
Apr 26, 2022•33 min•Season 3Ep. 3
“We regulate each other’s nervous systems,” says the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic.” “We are the caretakers of each other’s nervous systems.” So feeling—and thinking—and the regulations of law join together; the idea that laws exist apart from our nervous systems, our feelings, doesn’t quite work, in this sense. The poet Peter Cole here describes an emotional state associated with the language of rules and ritual in the Hebrew Bible, and in Leviticus parti...
Apr 19, 2022•42 min•Season 3Ep. 2
This season, we're rambling through and beyond a book sacred in multiple traditions, a book that keeps generating debate and commentary and tangents. It's the Hebrew Bible, home to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his Ark, David and Goliath, and prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. Here, in a season we're calling "Mosaic Mosaic," it especially prompts conversations about the mysteries of thought and language. The novelist Joshua Cohen explains in this episode that the Hebrew Bible poses fundam...
Apr 12, 2022•35 min•Season 3Ep. 1
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, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible. Guests for season three include: Peter Cole, the poet and M...
Apr 06, 2022•4 min•Season 3Ep. 1
The 1,001 Nights are not typically about conclusions, but about the suggestion of more stories, more information passed from person to person, language to language. In this, the last episode of this season, Mazen Naous—a scholar whose specialties include the Nights—points out the implication of the phrase “thousand and one nights”: “There’s always one more story, always one more story to be told, the stories have no beginning and no end. That’s partly why the Nights still inspire rewrites and re...
Dec 07, 2021•31 min
1,001 Nights begins in horror: a king threatens to kill, and Shahrazad tells stories to keep the king from doing so. The ongoing nature of the stories, then, relies on a drive to live, manifesting the basic connection between our intuitive selves and imagination. When stories really survive, there’s more to them than repetitive cliffhangers or excessively elaborated detail—something more than escapist entertainment, even if that’s there, too. Hearty White says in this episode, “I don’t care for ...
Nov 30, 2021•34 min•Season 2Ep. 4
The 1,001 Nights are full of patterns; the stories have formulas, and this too anticipates the world of television, comic books, video games. Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, says in this episode, “Formula is essential to the work. It draws it force from accumulation. It draws its meaning from pattern.” But formulaic narrative doesn’t necessarily mean mind-numbing sameness. It can mean the opposite. Hearty White, the host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, talks in this episode about watching...
Nov 23, 2021•35 min•Season 2Ep. 3
The House of Wisdom was a center of learning in Baghdad of the Abbasid caliphate. Established in the eighth century, it sustained a golden age of science that coincided with the collection of early versions of the 1,001 Nights. In this episode, we hear about the science of the Nights, the science of the Abbasid age, and the history, more broadly, of science fiction. A similar exchange from culture to culture, language to language, made possible the scientific advances of this time and 1,001 Nigh...
Nov 16, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 2
You know Shahrazad, who tells a story every night in order to survive and save lives; you also know the collection of stories that results: 1,001 Nights. At least, you've felt the influence of those stories. On TV, in books, in comics—you’ve experienced things informed by the episodic narratives of Shahrazad. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ll hear how the Nights opened paths to infinite story possibility within repetitive constraints. Even as the threat of death looms over Shahraz...
Nov 09, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 1
The Cosmic Library follows tangents out of literary classics concerned with infinity. Building on Lit Hub’s five-part Finnegan and Friends podcast, this series explores the most unfathomable books in conversation with an eclectic cast of guests. The upcoming season, The Worlds of Scheherazade, plunges into and out of the 1,001 Nights with guests Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker; Yasmine Seale, translator of the 1,001 Nights; Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist; Mazen Naous, professor of ...
Oct 25, 2021•3 min
