The Cosmic Library
Episodes
7.5 In Search of Lost Time: Surprise Ending
18 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Time Regained, the concluding volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, an older version of the narrator gloomily decides ...
7.4 In Search of Lost Time: Art vs. Jealousy
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Prisoner—the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time—spirals through the vortex of the narrator’s jealousy concerning Albertine. Somethi...
7.3 In Search of Lost Time: Wasting Time
04 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The “lost time” of In Search of Lost Time can connote “wasted time,” and Marcel Proust’s narrator does confront wastes of time, th...
7.2 In Search of Lost Time: Enchanted Self-Discovery
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
7.1 In Search of Lost Time: Imaginary Music
18 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Season 7 Trailer: In Search of Lost Time
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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....
6.5 Karamazov Season: Where Parallels Converge
14 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
6.4 Karamazov Season: Math Dreams
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 di...
6.3 Karamazov Season: Philosophical Phrenzy
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky created his ultimate novel of ideas, with brothers Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha pursuing a range of philoso...
6.2 Karamazov Season: The Fiction Machine
23 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts ideas into motion, and into emotional conflict, with combustible results. The convictions he express...
6.1 Karamazov Season: The Radio Play
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Season 6 Trailer: Karamazov Season
02 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 min...
5.5 The Short Story in the U.S.: Otherworldly Bedtime Stories
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
5.4 The Short Story in the U.S.: NYC+MFA+ATL
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“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 at...
5.3 The Short Story in the U.S.: It's Weird
08 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
American short stories started out weird. Consider Nathaniel Hawthorne, as we just did in episode two this season—or, consider Edgar Allan Poe. Exis...
5.2 The Short Story in the U.S.: Wake Up with Wakefield
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 sto...
5.1 The Short Story in the U.S.: Introduction
24 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 5 Trailer: The Short Story in the United States
03 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 boo...
4.5 The Hall of the Monkey King: Immortality
04 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 reinventio...
4.4 The Hall of the Monkey King: Cinematic Transcendence
27 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ci...
4.3 The Hall of the Monkey King: The Flawed Mind Monkey
20 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King’s adventure th...
4.2 The Hall of the Monkey King: Lawful Chaos
13 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
4.1 The Hall of the Monkey King: Introduction
06 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
Season 4 Trailer: The Hall of the Monkey King
25 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mys...
3.5 Mosaic Mosaic: You Take It from Here
10 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It's not just the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible that puzzle and provoke readers—there are, throughout, passages of intense emotional or moral p...
3.4 Mosaic Mosaic: Struggling with Disaster
03 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 word...
3.3 Mosaic Mosaic: Dream Interpretation
26 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Stuck in a lonely motel room, you have a good chance of finding a Bible, left for anyone similarly stuck in a strange interval between days. In this w...
3.2 Mosaic Mosaic: Laws of Emotion
19 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“We regulate each other’s nervous systems,” says the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic.” “We are the c...
3.1 Mosaic Mosaic: Introduction
12 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This season, we're rambling through and beyond a book sacred in multiple traditions, a book that keeps generating debate and commentary and tangents....
Season 3 Trailer: Introducing Mosaic Mosaic
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mys...
2.5 The Worlds of Scheherazade: Inconclusion
07 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The 1,001 Nights are not typically about conclusions, but about the suggestion of more stories, more information passed from person to person, languag...
2.4 The Worlds of Scheherazade: Survival
30 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
1,001 Nights begins in horror: a king threatens to kill, and Shahrazad tells stories to keep the king from doing so. The ongoing nature of the stories...
2.3 The Worlds of Scheherazade: Formulaic Surprises
23 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The 1,001 Nights are full of patterns; the stories have formulas, and this too anticipates the world of television, comic books, video games. Yasmine ...
2.2 The Worlds of Scheherazade: Magnet Mountain
16 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The House of Wisdom was a center of learning in Baghdad of the Abbasid caliphate. Established in the eighth century, it sustained a golden age of scie...
2.1 The Worlds of Scheherazade: Introduction
09 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You know Shahrazad, who tells a story every night in order to survive and save lives; you also know the collection of stories that results: 1,001 Nigh...
The Worlds of Scheherazade Trailer
25 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Cosmic Library follows tangents out of literary classics concerned with infinity. Building on Lit Hub’s five-part Finnegan and Friends podcast, ...
1.5 Finnegan and Friends: Musical Conclusions
29 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Some of Finnegans Wake’s canniest readers, like guest Olwen Fouéré, don’t read the whole thing. That makes sense, too, considering that the book...
1.4 Finnegan and Friends: Familiar Language
22 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Think of your most obscure, private, family chatter—some combination of baby-talk and nicknames and reiterations of the same concerns or jokes. It w...
1.3 Finnegan and Friends: Water
15 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The “wake” in Finnegans Wake means both a joyous funereal gathering (here Joyce invented the word “funferal”) and a rising from sleep. But it ...
1.2 Finnegan and Friends: Dreams
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Finnegans Wake—a book of rebirth and reawakening—finds its engine for rejuvenation in dreaminess. This matches what neuroscientists tell us: sleep...
1.1 Finnegan and Friends: Introduction
01 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake doesn’t work like other novels. It has lines like: “What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-g...
Finnegan and Friends Trailer
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Prepare for our five-part series about the most mystifying book ever written: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With a range of guests—including a nov...