Literary Hub

Announcing the New Season of The Cosmic Library

Join Us As We Explore 1,001 Nights

November 2, 2021

Building on Lit Hub’s five-part Finnegan and Friends podcast, the new season of The Cosmic Library, “The Worlds of Scheherazade,” plunges into and out of the 1,001 Nights with guests Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker; Yasmine Seale, translator of the 1,001 Nights; Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist; Mazen Naous, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU.

Check out the trailer below and subscribe to listen to last season and the new season launching November 9, 2021:

Subscribe, listen, and enjoy the engaging interviews as we bring you The Cosmic Library. Episodes will begin running weekly throughout the rest of the year, and will be available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, PocketCasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Finnegan and Friends

This is a five-part series about the most mystifying book ever written: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With a range of guests—including a novelist, an actor, a sleep specialist, a philosopher, and several Joyce scholars—Finnegan and Friends follows tangents inspired by Joyce’s novel of dreamy strangeness. We discover, along the way, that the Wake’s infinite complexity comes from attention to our most simple, elemental experiences (of dreams, of water, of local and familiar language). This show celebrates the wonders of the basic stuff of life.