Bedtime Stories for Tired Parents
Welcome to our little corner of the literary world! We're a husband and wife team who, like so many exhausted parents, found ourselves craving connection—with each other and with the stories that remind us we're more than just people who wipe surfaces and answer the same question seventeen times. After our daughter finally goes to bed each night, we pour a drink, collapse onto the couch, and somehow muster the energy to dive into a single short story from A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker. One story, one episode. That's it. We started this because, honestly, who has the brain capacity to read a whole book anymore? But a short story? We can handle that. And the conversations they spark when we're too tired to pretend we have it all together? Those are everything. Join us as we explore tales of love, loss, absurdity, and human nature—sometimes brilliant, sometimes baffling, always discussed through the haze of parental fatigue.
Episodes
Nov 23, 2025
Nov 23, 2025
20 min
We're kicking things off with E.B. White's 1926 "Life Cycle of a Literary Genius"—and honestly, we almost didn't make it past the title. After forgetting to read the introduction (parenting brain strikes again), stumbling into some juicy gossip about White's complicated relationship with his New Yorker editor, and one of us starting out pretty skeptical about the whole thing, something unexpected happened: we actually came around to it. By the end, we were already looking forward to the second story.
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Next episode: "Over the River and Through the Wood" by John O'Hara (1934)
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