In the landscape of digital literary media, few programs possess the intellectual intimacy of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. Hosted by Deborah Treisman, the program operates on a very simple premise: a contemporary writer selects a story from the magazine’s archives, reads it aloud, and discusses it. The result is a rare, multi-layered encounter that deepens our understanding of both the reader and the read. Through the guest’s choice of text and the specific cadence of their performance, the listener gains access to a private dialogue between two creative minds—one present, one past—bridged by the shared mechanics of the craft.
The three episodes that best illuminate this dynamic feature Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Book of Sand,” his “Shakespeare’s Memory,” and Italo Calvino’s “Love Far from Home.” While celebrated as meditations on memory and infinity, these pieces are also sharp observations of human obsession. Whether it is a bibliophile terrorized by an infinite book, a scholar overwhelmed by a dead poet’s trivial memories, or a young man’s absentee romances in identical places, these stories examine the motivation for reading and writing itself.
“The Book of Sand” by Jorge Luis Borges
Borges’s “The Book of Sand” introduces a physical manifestation of the infinite: a book with pages that are never the same twice and lack a clear beginning or end. This preoccupation with the overwhelming nature of information was a lifelong theme for Borges, who famously served as the Director of the National Library of Argentina. Despite his growing blindness, he oversaw a vast collection of volumes, once remarking, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
In the podcast episode featuring Mohsin Hamid, the focus shifts to the protagonist’s escalating anxiety as he realizes he can neither finish nor destroy the infinite object. He begins as a curious collector but ends as a paranoid wreck, hiding the metaphysical volume behind a row of broken encyclopedias as if it were a piece of contraband. The weight of infinite choice turns the owner into a prisoner in his own home. At the peak of his desperation, the narrator considers burning the volume, only to be struck by the logical horror that an infinite book would produce an infinite amount of ash. He envisions the entire planet eventually being smothered in a layer of grey dust—a literal consequence of trying to contain a universe that is fundamentally unarchivable.
“Shakespeare’s Memory” by Jorge Luis Borges
In “Shakespeare’s Memory,” one of Borges’s final stories, a man is gifted the literal, exhaustive memory of William Shakespeare—an inheritance that proves to be as much a burden as a blessing. The protagonist, Hermann Soergel, is a pedantic German scholar who has spent his life studying the Bard from a distance. When he is offered the chance to possess the actual memories of the poet, he accepts with a “scholar’s greed,” only to find that these memories do not come as a tidy library of genius.
Instead, Soergel becomes a man possessed by the mundane clutter of another man’s life. He doesn’t gain Shakespeare’s talent; he gains Shakespeare’s grocery lists, his boring dreams about Stratford, and his forgotten appointments. The realization that a life is made of such trivialities is a slow-acting poison for a man who expected to be transformed by art. The scholar finds himself literally being crowded out of his own brain by a dead playwright’s mundane errands—an inescapable irony for someone who sought the ultimate intellectual authority and found only a cluttered attic of the mind.
“Love Far from Home” by Italo Calvino
Contrary to Calvino’s later reputation for high fabulism, “Love Far from Home” is a work of sharp, poignant realism that mirrors the “infinite” loops of Borges in the realm of human emotion. The story follows a youth attempting a radical escape from himself, bidding a restless “bye town” and “bye girlfriend” as he drifts to a new city. However, he quickly discovers that geography is no cure for the self; wherever he goes, the environment feels identical. The narrator observes that “landladies send the furniture on from town to town because they know I’m coming,” leading to the realization that “it’s always the same room,” no matter how far he travels.
The narrator finds himself caught in a cycle where every girlfriend is the same and every experience of “love” is indistinguishable from the last. For a young man trying to develop or make meaningful choices, the realization that the world offers no true novelty is a quiet existential weight. Much like the “Book of Sand” that can never be finished or the “Shakespearean memory” that overwrites the scholar, Calvino’s protagonist is trapped in a different kind of infinity: the infinite sameness of his own identity. He discovers that he cannot outrun the narrative he has already written for himself, making the act of love not a bridge to another person, but a mirror reflecting his own inescapable patterns.
Conclusion: The Living Archive
The New Yorker Fiction Podcast is a wonderful audio archive that shares with us the curatorial taste and deep understanding authors have about other authors; it is a living demonstration of the mechanics behind the craft. In these three episodes, we also see modern writers engaging with the fundamental absurdities of the intellectual and emotional life.
The depth of engagement is perhaps best exemplified in the episode where Richard Ford reads John Cheever’s “Reunion.” When Treisman asks how many times he has read the story, Ford responds, “probably three hundred times.” To me, this reveals the profound level of intimacy and obsession that defines these wonderful encounters between authors.