The Cosmic Library

In  Time Regained ,   the concluding volume of Marcel Proust’s  In Search of Lost Time , an older version of the narrator gloomily decides to attend a gathering at the Guermantes' mansion. He’s thinking, as Joshua Landy paraphrases here, "I might as well go and waste my time with these high-society snobs." But then he experiences a jolt of involuntary memory, prompted by a step onto...

The Prisoner —the fifth volume of  In Search of Lost Time —spirals through the vortex of the narrator’s jealousy concerning Albertine. Something of that vortex churns on into The Fugitive —the sixth volume—and then the focus moves toward grief. But across the entire novel, there are intimations of other ways to be, of other possibilities for the narrator. Hannah Freed-Thall describes, for exa...

The “lost time” of  In Search of Lost Time  can connote “wasted time,” and Marcel Proust’s narrator does confront wastes of time, through pretentious conversations and moments when habit takes control. But the novel makes much of this waste, and we glimpse something beyond wasted time when involuntary memory prompts the narrator to consider existence beyond a drably habitual scheme. Chri...

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time follows the development of a self. The narrator grows up in Combray, in the seaside town of Balbec, in Paris, and resolves to become a writer. But that narrative also encompasses so much else, from historical crises to philosophical riffs to self-doubts. Proust scholar Joshua Landy points out that Proust is “absolutely laying traps for the reader. He's tempti...

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time lifts off on page after page, but it always returns to earth, back to the narrator’s memories and thoughts and experiences. Somehow, this seven-volume French novel from the early twentieth century covers a vast range of possibility and surprise while still concerned completely with the thoughts and feelings of a single person—the narrator, whom we might or mi...

The new season of The Cosmic Library is on the way, and this time we’re talking about—and listening to—Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time . Conversations go everywhere: we’re thinking about the nature of time, music, and the self, and we’re figuring out how focusing on self might take us way beyond ourselves. Each episode will include a reading from In Search of Lost Time . This miniseries, th...

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 incomplet...

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...

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 an...

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-ep...

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 f...

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 transformativ...

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 demonstrat...

“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 hel...

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 poin...

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 extreme...

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 T...

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...

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....

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,...

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, fo...

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...

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...

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 "T...

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 p...