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; season four, Journey to the West. Now, it's short stories in the United States.
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 story "Wakefield," read by the actor Max Gordon Moore. It's a story from the 1830s, reflecting from the first sentence the early American interest in strange information found repeatedly in periodicals, and then it follows that strangeness to cosmic extremes.
If you know Hawthorne mostly as the author of The Scarlet Letter, you're in for a surprise in this story about a guy who moves basically next door and hides for twenty years. Short stories are good at this kind of surprise, too. They can be vehicles for writers to explore especially unusual material, and Hawthorne pursued that exploration with something like baroque concision. The novelist Justin Taylor says, of Hawthorne the writer of short stories, "When he was good, he was so good."
Max Gordon Moore reflects on the especially active thinking that Hawthorne's story stirs up: "I find myself perplexed in a fun way," he says. As Deborah Treisman mentions in this episode, of effective short stories in general, "If the reader has to do some work, the reader becomes implicated in the story. If you're immersed in it, you've gone somewhere, you've been part of it, and then it's going to stay with you."
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
Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap
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