The Cosmic Library

Latest Episodes:

7.5 In Search of Lost Time: Surprise Ending Mar 18, 2026

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In Time Regained,the concluding volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, an older version of the narrator gloomily decides to attend a gathering at the Guermantes' mansion. He’s thinking, as Joshua Landy paraphrases here, "I might as well go and waste my time with these high-society snobs." But then he experiences a jolt of involuntary memory, prompted by a step onto uneven paving stones. His memory casts him across time, and he begins to think that he could commit himself to writing that might also access something true and enduring, beyond conventional time.

"With Proust,” Hannah Freed-Thall tells us, “chance and contingency are so at the center of his aesthetic and epistemological world." Involuntary memory, by which the narrator senses a connection to a kind of being apart from the usual passage of time, has to happen by surprise, or it won’t be involuntary. Chance, therefore, leads to a feeling for something kind of magical. "Precisely because nothing is ordering this," Freed-Thall says, "enchantment is possible."

When Proust’s narrator joins the party, however, he encounters aging characters, and the unavoidable force of mundane time is made vivid. He and the reader are left with a sense of something enduring along with recognition of the passage of time. Neither time nor timelessness seems to win here. “We can make of music what we will,” Alex Ross said earlier this season, and similarly, readers are free to make of this conclusion—and all of In Search of Lost Time—what they will.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; 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.

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7.4 In Search of Lost Time: Art vs. Jealousy Mar 11, 2026

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The Prisoner—the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time—spirals through the vortex of the narrator’s jealousy concerning Albertine. Something of that vortex churns on into The Fugitive—the sixth volume—and then the focus moves toward grief. But across the entire novel, there are intimations of other ways to be, of other possibilities for the narrator. Hannah Freed-Thall describes, for example, a beach scene in the second volume, where the narrator is “in love with the whole landscape, and the sea, and the beach, and the air.”

Intense experiences of art also jolt the narrator into other kinds of thinking. Joshua Landy says, “Art ends up being the answer to a lot of questions. In this context, one of the questions that it’s answering is: how can I make genuine contact with another mind?” Alex Ross explains how music in Proust’s novel offers “a deeper and more complex experience of life, time, memory, everything.” Hannah Freed-Thall sees potential for that richer experience beyond the narrator’s engagement with art, too. “In Proust,” she says, “it’s like everything is an aesthetic experience.”

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7.3 In Search of Lost Time: Wasting Time Mar 04, 2026

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The “lost time” of In Search of Lost Time can connote “wasted time,” and Marcel Proust’s narrator does confront wastes of time, through pretentious conversations and moments when habit takes control. But the novel makes much of this waste, and we glimpse something beyond wasted time when involuntary memory prompts the narrator to consider existence beyond a drably habitual scheme.

Christine Smallwood reads here from her book La Captive, where, reflecting on concepts of art and wasted time that the narrator considers, she writes, “Art is a record of the waste. It holds the waste, and changes it. Its material is time, and it makes time material.” In this episode, you'll hear how wasted time, the time of dull habits, gets remixed and reworked by Proust. And you’ll hear readings from the third and fourth volumes of the novel: The Guermantes Way and Sodom et Gomorrah.

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7.2 In Search of Lost Time: Enchanted Self-Discovery Feb 25, 2026

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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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7.1 In Search of Lost Time: Imaginary Music Feb 18, 2026

Show notes

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.”

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Season 7 Trailer: In Search of Lost Time Jan 29, 2026

Show notes

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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6.5 Karamazov Season: Where Parallels Converge May 14, 2025

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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, nosystem 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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6.4 Karamazov Season: Math Dreams May 07, 2025

Show notes

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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6.3 Karamazov Season: Philosophical Phrenzy Apr 30, 2025

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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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6.2 Karamazov Season: The Fiction Machine Apr 23, 2025

Show notes

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

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

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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