The Cosmic Library

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 YorkerTayari Jones, author of An American MarriageBecca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too SmallJustin Taylor, author of RebootAndrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short IntroductionMax Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 episode:Literary critics have been arguing about the spiritual, religious elements of the book for centuries. Some have always maintained that the book has actually a very intricate religious design, that Monkey is an allegory for the human mind. So in this reading, Monkey stands for the instability of human genius in need of discipline, namely the trials of the pilgrimage, to realize its potential for good. There’s justification for such a reading, even if it’s not the only possible interpretation of this book. Lovell says:The earliest Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese analogize the human mind as a monkey, as restless, erratic, volatile. And by the end of the first millennium C.E., the phrase “monkey of the mind” (xinyuan) had become a stock literary allusion for this restless human mind. Following the Monkey King’s successful scenes of mischief, you might interpret the book as a joyous celebration of that Monkey Mind; or, the difficulties and disciplinary experiences that change the Monkey King could make the novel seem like a spiritually exacting pilgrim’s quest. There's no single answer here. You'll have to choose your own adventure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kaiser Kuo, co-founder of China's first heavy metal band, discusses the blend of belief systems in Journey to the West. The novel intertwines Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism through the chaotic good Monkey King and lawful good monk Tripitaka. The story reflects a playful engagement with various traditions, drawing inspiration from a historical Tang dynasty character. The podcast explores spiritual themes, transformation, and cosmopolitanism within the context of the novel.

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 example, its story is woven into the new Disney+ streaming series American Born Chinese (based on a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang). And it’s also the right book to include on The Cosmic Library shelf alongside Finnegans Wake, 1,001 Nights, and the Hebrew Bible—it’s full of transformations, dream-like scenes, and surprising complications. This season, we’ll hear readings from the book and talk about Buddhism, Daoism, cinema, comedy, and more. There’s a lot here. Journey to the West continually jolts the reader toward some joke, spiritual consideration, or satirical deflation of such considerations. Gene Luen Yang has described, in his foreword to Julia Lovell’s recent translation of Journey to the West, how tales of the Monkey King worked in his childhood as bedtime stories. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ll hear how it’s the kind of book to read into the night, into the dream-like realm where categories blur, where thoughts and moods shift continually. Guests this season will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston— she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure.Guests for season four will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard; and D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia. The five episodes will come out weekly, starting in late spring of 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 familiar notions of what life is about, notions of meaning or usefulness. You have to respond to something like that. You have to think of your own answer to the book that declares: "There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after." Poetry often poses such challenges that can't be easily explained or resolved, but in return, these challenges might activate the mind. The poet and critic Elisa Gabbert says, "When I'm reading or when I'm writing, I'm just thinking better than I am at any other time." The Hebrew Bible prompts you to figure things out on your own, with particular attention to language. As Peter Cole says: "At the very heart of this text, what do you have? You've got this ultimate transparency and ultimate opacity, which is the name of God, the four-letter name of God, which is unpronounceable, and no one really knows what it means." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name? As Peter Cole says, "The release from that one struggle, and the blessing, only comes with a knowledge of names." Even this physical wrestling match becomes a matter of language, then.Struggles with outright disaster generate language quests, too. Elisa Gabbert elaborates on disaster poetry in this episode, especially on the subject of W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." She says: "It reminds you how much text there is in a poem. It's wild." And she describes a proliferating kind of irony that radiates possibilities in so many directions, to which poetry might grant access.Find more from Elisa Gabbert on Auden’s poem here:https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/06/books/auden-musee-des-beaux-arts.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices