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 tempting the reader into thinking it's a memoir at times. And he's tempting the reader to think that it's a treatise, that all the things that this narrator says can be taken at face value—you can take them to the bank, it's the gospel truth, this is what Proust believes. In fact, that's not the case.”

As Hannah Freed-Thall, a scholar of Proust at NYU, says: “I try to approach this text with a certain humility . . . I will never make an argument that is true for the entirety of this novel. It’s just too self-contradictory.” In this episode, we talk about how multitudinous richness buzzes throughout the novel’s story of self-discovery. Along the way, you'll hear a reading from Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust; and Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm.

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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 might not call Marcel, and who famously lights up when the taste of a madeleine reveals a world of memory.

In this season of The Cosmic Library, we talk about how À la recherche du temps perdu soars beyond—and stays within—its limits. Artistic discovery pulses through this novel, even though it’s full of encounters with society’s cliches, with bad habits, with jealous obsession, and with wasted time, all of which are experienced by the narrator as he grows up.

In this miniseries, we’ll hear passages from each volume of In Search of Lost Time, so you can consider these five episodes to be an unusual adaptation of Proust’s novel. Along the way, we’ll talk about the novel's notions of music, of self-discovery, of bad habits, and more. In this introduction, we hear from the first volume, Swann’s Way, and especially get into the subject of music, which activates the narrator’s thinking and that of the narrator’s family friend Charles Swann. Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker, explains here that the novel is "very observant about how music comes into our life and how it can obsess us.” Prompted by Proust’s musical sensibility, this season will also continually rework The Cosmic Library’s own theme song, turning to music in a way that might—the hope is—advance the show to new intensities.

Intense experiences of art can, in Proust’s novel, make things happen. The Proust scholar Joshua Landy says that the novel's music “provides us a formal model for thinking about the shape of our own life.” And a novel where lives take musical shape can take some surprising turns. Hannah Freed-Thall, Proust scholar at NYU, says that “it feels like a text that is wild and not 100% in control of itself, and that’s appealing to me.” In Search of Lost Time can explore selfhood, then, and find that the self is a sprawling, mutable thing. As the novelist Rick Moody tells us, “Especially as you get towards volume seven, there’s not a stable Marcel.”

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust; and Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm.

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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, then, works as an unconventional audiobook adaptation of Proust’s novel—full of digressions, conversations about the book, commentary, and riffs, but always looping back into readings from the novel itself.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; and Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust.

The first episode will be out on February 18, and new episodes will come out weekly into March. Find it at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts!

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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 Karamazov, no system of thought is complete on its own. Characters also change each other continually, as if in a sort of infinite chain reaction. A sense of intensified possibility pervades, and the brothers move toward that sense especially in their connection to childhood.

Throughout The Brothers Karamazov—and throughout this season—there are prompts to reflect on earlier states of potential, to recall what came before. Garth Risk Hallberg in this episode describes how the novel prompts reflection on itself, gets the reader to look back on what’s been read or experienced: Dostoevsky, Hallberg says, “likes to inset these little mirrors into the text that reflect back on it and force you to reconsider what you’re reading.” In this sense, the ending of the book—and this miniseries—can send you back to all kinds of beginnings, including this season’s first episode, where you can hear the Brothers Karamazov radio play that started things.

Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire

Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America

Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel  

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic

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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. Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky scholar, says here: “Dreams that characters have are as important to them, in the long run, and as illuminating to them in the long run, as any philosophical ideas that they might embrace.” Math and dreams both offer means by which alternative ways of thinking can be accessed, and by which separations might get resolved or reconsidered.

Mathematician and science journalist Paulina Rowińska says in this episode, “Math is much richer than what we learn in school. And the key point, that’s also relevant to Dostoevsky, is that math is also relative, as with Euclidean/non-Euclidean.” Different geometries, different philosophies, and different states of consciousness all offer ways for characters to think differently, and change, and collide in The Brothers Karamazov. No single system seems victorious here, but the process that moves through system after system—or character after character—works with irresistibly vital, dramatic force.

Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire

Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America

Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel  

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic

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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 season: “This is a fundamental aspect of the Karamazov legacy, this interest in what can’t be said—it’s like in action and bodily things. Somehow that takes the form of both Dmitri’s wild, manic spree, and maybe the other side of the same coin is Alyosha’s desire for religious transcendence.”

In this episode, we think about how the novel's philosophizing goes beyond normal modes. Katherine Bowers describes the novel as “kind of a reaction chamber” to explore the interactions of multiple ideas with multiple people. The Brothers Karamazov, in that sense, shows us thinking and feeling that charge each other up, from person to person, in a process that compels characters just beyond what they can say or comprehend in the usual ways—toward a place beyond reason.

Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire

Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America

Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel  

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic

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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 fiction works. 

“I’m, if not smarter, then at least more interesting as a fiction writer,” says the novelist Andrew Martin, “because ambiguity is so much more possible in fiction. You can argue with yourself in interesting ways, and you can not really know what you mean.” Of his own fiction, Martin says that “the characters do things that are more interesting than what I would explain to be my thesis about our generation.”

This fiction machine still uses gears and parts from the non-fictional world. For example: Dostoevsky, we learn in this episode, was inspired by nineteenth-century Russia’s jury system to develop a fiction encompassing multiple views of the truth. “The voices of the jury might provide alternative histories, let’s say, of what actually happened,” says Katherine Bowers, a Dostoevsky scholar. Also, “the jury might subvert the truth,” she adds, or “the jury might act as a truth-finding agent.” All options are in play, it seems, in Dostoevsky’s novel.

Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire

Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America

Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel  

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic

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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 around three siblings, sons of the murdered Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. In this radio play, we pick up on the following quality of the Karamazovs: the brothers are all, in a way, literary makers. The rationalist Ivan Karamazov writes a story, “The Grand Inquisitor,” that remains the book’s most famous passage; the distraught Dmitri Karamazov speaks at times in the manner of lyrical Romanticism; and the religious Alyosha delivers a rhetorically powerful speech to conclude the novel (and this radio play). 

We find other similarities between the brothers, too: as the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg says, “It’s like a Charlie Kaufman novel,” in which separations and distinctions collapse. He says, “As you go further and further on, it’s like they all have bits of each other mixed in, they’re all sort of one thing.”

Here, Hallberg will play Dmitri; the novelist Andrew Martin is Ivan; and the WFMU radio host Hearty White is our Alyosha. 

Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire

Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America

Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel  

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic

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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 include a radio play adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel, in which the parts of the three central brothers will be read by people who create fiction. Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire, will read the part of Dmitri Karamazov; Andrew Martin, author of Cool for America, will read the part of Ivan Karamazov; and WFMU host Hearty White is our Alyosha Karamazov. 

After the play, the conversations begin. The novelists reflect on their own writing along with Dostoevsky’s; Hearty White connects cinema with radio with literature; scholars Robin Feuer Miller and Katherine Bowers consider the life of Dostoevsky and his novel; and the mathematician Paulina Rowińska guides us through the logical and mathematical questions prompted by this book of conflicting and converging thoughts. It’s a season about frenzied doubts and discoveries, about philosophical intensity and weird dreams, about mathematical questions and literary surprise. Find it this spring at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts.

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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 Cosmic Library’s season on the short story in the U.S.—examines those connections.

Deborah Treisman says in this episode, of the observation that her own New Yorker Fiction podcast can soothe its listeners, “When people say they use my podcast to fall asleep, it feels slightly insulting. But there is something about being read to, and we all really love it. And it takes us back to childhood, and it is soothing.”

Fiction's capacity for tranquil transport isn’t about boredom, either. Stories vanquish boredom, taking audiences on adventures into something beyond their immediate experience. And often, stories don’t even reassure us. Andrew Kahn points out here that “with the short story, in a way the whole plot can come down to irony, which leaves a situation unresolved, open, something to think about rather than all tied up.”

The calming effect and the strange openness of stories can have, it turns out, everything to do with each other. With some of the most ambitious literature, as Deborah Treisman says, “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.”

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

Andrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction

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“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 major institutions in the history of American fiction. In this episode, then, we talk about The New Yorker and other forces sustaining short stories.

As unruly and unclassifiable as short stories can be, they often live in some august realms: in The New Yorker, for example, or major MFA programs. And elite organizations tend not to do well with unruliness or unclassifiability. But when it comes to short stories, the great achievements of literary institutions have come from the pursuit rather than restriction of short fiction's possibilities. Those possibilities are frequently found far from the publishing industry's hubs: Tayari Jones describes, for instance, how writers can do their best work by leaving the publishing capital of New York City for home, wherever it may be (Atlanta, in her case).

Thriving U.S. institutions with a commitment to short stories all rely, in some way, on voices and tendencies beyond those institutions. The New Yorker, says the literary scholar Andrew Kahn, “for a long time has had a very, very diverse and interesting and jumbled-up catalog.” And the writer Justin Taylor says, of MFA programs, “the institutions are not the ivory towers they think they are. They're deeply reflective of the cultures that are producing them.” 

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

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