The Cosmic Library Adam Colman

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
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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 this story about a guy who moves basically next door and hides for twenty years. Short stories are good at this kind of surprise, too. They can be vehicles for writers to explore especially unusual material, and Hawthorne pursued that exploration with something like baroque concision. The novelist Justin Taylor says, of Hawthorne the writer of short stories, “When he was good, he was so good.”

Max Gordon Moore reflects on the especially active thinking that Hawthorne's story stirs up: “I find myself perplexed in a fun way,” he says. As Deborah Treisman mentions in this episode, of effective short stories in general, “If the reader has to do some work, the reader becomes implicated in the story. If you’re immersed in it, you’ve gone somewhere, you’ve been part of it, and then it’s going to stay with you.”

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
Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap
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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 short stories Andrew Kahn, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. And you’ll hear a reading of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story that will add an exciting new dimension to your reality.

Deborah Treisman in this first episode clarifies both the challenge and the promise of our subject. She says, “The term itself, 'American short story,' is slightly problematic, just because there are so many people in the U.S. writing short stories who perhaps came from somewhere else, who have a different heritage, whatever else it is—they're not playing into this tradition of Updike and Cheever and so on." Short stories in the United States tell us something way beyond any straightforward national narrative. "What's around right now is such multiplicity," Treisman says, "that it's rare to find a story that you would think of as classically American.”

Contemplating multiplicity is part of the mission here in season five. We're talking about expansive range, about the uncontainable proliferation sustained by brevity. Short fiction, it turns out, can launch you into maximal excess just as novels can—and much more swiftly.

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
Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap
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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 classic story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which this guy moves next door and hides out for twenty years.

Guests include The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Oxford scholar Andrew Kahn, Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld, the novelist (and writer of short stories) Justin Taylor, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. Find it at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts—new episodes will be released weekly, starting April 24th.
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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 the title of the novel that is translated as 'journey'—you—can also be translated as 'play.'"
Kaiser Kuo describes the history of openness in China with regard to cosmopolitanism. He mentions the echoes between the Ming Dynasty (when Journey to the West was written) and the Tang Dynasty (when the novel is set). Both of those dynasties, he says, have "periods of outward-facing and inward-facing.” These are times of intensified tensions that Kaiser Kuo observes here across Chinese history.
Journey to the West makes much of related dynamics between outward-facing and inward-facing, especially through its playful mood. In this novel, adventuring through traditions from China and from outside China, thinking in different keys, leaping from philosophy to philosophy, and seeking transcendence all depend upon a wild amount of play, of experiment, of fun.
Guests this season include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of Chinese literature at Harvard; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; and Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast.
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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 Chinese settings. Karen Fang, scholar of cinema and literature at the University of Houston, notes “threads of connection” between Journey to the West and wuxia, and connections include the similar presence of a spiritual quest and martial artistry in a mythical-historical world. Still, to be clear: in this installment, we’re going for a walk away from the novel and into the movies. It’s just that we find a few patterns that match those of the Monkey King’s adventures. 

Wuxia stories, like the Monkey King’s, draw from dynamics between intense self-cultivation and power struggle. The result is a durable kind of kinetic drama—it’s opened up cinematic possibilities for decades. Karen Fang explains the heart of it all: “The underlying idea in wuxia is this idea that somebody can reach a level of human transcendency—a transcendent power, a transcendent skill—through years of training and dedication, both to physical training, but also spiritual dedication.”

Guests in this episode include Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; and Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King.
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