5.5 The Short Story in the U.S.: Otherworldly Bedtime Stories

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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