thebookishowl.com

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s story collection What You Are Now Enjoying is dark and surreal but suffused with humor, a promising debut that showcases her unique voice.

Stewart O’Nan wrote of the book:

“The smart, funky, well-turned stories in What You Are Now Enjoying keep the reader not just guessing and leaning forward but in a perpetual state of wonder. Sarah Gerkensmeyer is an original, a sneaky sorceress of a storyteller.”

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don’t have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In her own words, here is Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel, What You Are Now Enjoying:

I’ve always had trouble with song lyrics. I’m not a good listener. When I was a kid, I loved the song “Careless Whisper” by George Michael. I didn’t know all the words, but I didn’t care. When I belted out the refrain, I sang: “I’m never gonna dance again. Alvin, Simon, Theodooore!” I’m jealous of writers who listen to music while they work. But I need quiet. I’d get too distracted by the music and my messed up attempts to make sense of the lyrics.

Music didn’t become a big part of my life as an adult until after my first son was born five years ago. Simon fell in love with Vampire Weekend before he turned one. My husband and I discovered Pandora and suddenly our house was filled with a collage of music that all of us loved. We have two sons now, and amid the chaos of parenting (and writing and teaching and everything else) we’ve got music playing all the time. Simon’s favorite band is still Vampire Weekend. His younger brother Charlie, who is louder and wilder, is in love with The Fratellis.

Somehow, my writing life has started to solidify and take off in exciting directions amid the wonderful disorder and commotion of raising young kids. I think my appreciation for music has also grown. I still don’t have enough focus—amid the wrestling matches of diaper changes and the execution of tickle fights—to pay close attention to the lyrics. But our family time is infused with a soundtrack. And I like to think that the songs that we love together somehow linger in my writing, too. Who cares if I don’t know all the words.

I’ve included a video of my son Simon when he was a baby listening to a Vampire Weekend song that is still one of his all-time favorites—”A-Punk.” And so that’s the song for my entire story collection. I like to think that I get as sucked into and carried away by my stories as this little guy dancing here.

Below are the stories from my collection, paired with some of the songs we listen to at my house. And a huge thank you to my husband Andy for making a couple cocktails after the boys were in bed and sitting down with me to listen to good music and talk about weird stories.

“What You Are Now Enjoying”: “Heart It Races,” Dr. Dog

This song throws the listener directly into the strange. And I like to think that the first story in my collection does this, as well. The lyrics are crazy weird—”legs like little splinters” and “legs like little spiders.” But the sound is wonderful. It pushes us forward.

“Dear John”: “Back in Your Head,” Tegan and Sara

Here’s a story where a husband begins to gradually disappear. He becomes both a new person and a ghost of his former self. To me, this is a story about longing. And in this song, the plaintive punch of the piano as well as the wailing of the refrain echo a similar longing to return to a place and a person and a time that has become unreachable.

“Careless Daughters”: “Hard to Love,” The Drums

Like so many of the other pieces in my book, this story has characters who are forced into an odd and stiff kind of intimacy (in this case, a guy places ads on the internet for women interested in secular polygamy). This song seems to encompass the strange sense of strained yet dynamic intimacy that some of us discover ourselves wrapped up in from time to time.

“Produce”: “Trust,” The Generationals

I think the funky beat of this song matches the sense of obsession and fetish in my story. We see a character who finds herself attracted to a stranger’s outward display of mysterious grief. And I love the huge question in the lyrics: “Carry the weight, carry the wound / Is it everything you want and more?”

“My Husband’s House”: “In the Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Harry McClintock

I’m not sure how this song ended up on one of our Pandora radio stations, but my sons and I love it. There is such a poignant mix of sweetness and eeriness and sadness in this song when you start to tap into the sense of yearning for an escape that seems impossible. The husband in my story also yearns for an escape that feels impossible and magical and wondrous and sad.

“Monster Drinks Chocolate Milk”: “Creep,” Radiohead

In this story, the monster who has been haunting the narrator’s nightmares since childhood wants to hang out in the narrator’s kitchen in the middle of the night and drink chocolate milk and discuss his anxiety and depression and lack of direction. So I most definitely have to go with “Creep.”

“Vanishing Point”: “Sleeping In,” The Postal Service

“Slightly bored and severely confused.” This lyric perfectly describes the people in this story who attend a remote, falling apart, overpriced camp in the Minnesota Boundary Waters Wilderness in order to reconnect with the twins they think they might have lost while in their mothers’ wombs. And: “Last week I had the strangest dream”—apply this to any story I have ever written (or even thought about writing).

“The Shopkeeper’s Tale”: “When They Fight They Fight,” The Generationals

In this story, a bunch of babies and toddlers gather outside a tiny baby boutique in a Brooklyn neighborhood and start banging on the windows and the locked door, because they know that the shop owner secretly hates babies. They are there for a good, old fashioned brawl.

“Hank”: “We’re Going to Be Friends,” The White Stripes

In this sweet song, the singer declares friendship, inviting us into the simple wonder of playtime and bugs. Hank is a three-month-old who begins talking to his nanny, pointing out the simple wonder of plants growing on the windowsill as well as the heavy-hearted weight of his parents’ failing marriage. He claims a friendship with his nanny, because he desperately needs it.

“The Rockport Falls Retirement Village Rescuers”: “First Day of My Life,” Bright Eyes

This song is beautiful. There’s such a hopeful sense that our lives can begin any day—that any day can be the first one. That’s the kind of hope I tried to discover in a story about a retirement village where everyone is reaching the end. I wanted there to be a sense of beginning, too.

“Wonder Woman Grew Up In Nebraska”: “5 Years Time,” Noah and the Whale

Welcome to a story in which the cartoon-colored, comic book version of Wonder Woman is an angsty teenager growing up in the middle of nowhere Nebraska, killing time with her girlfriends each weekend at a dingy airport bar. These young women don’t know, yet, the bite of nostalgia. They don’t know how much they will miss each other and how much they will miss the yawning stretch of boredom that they share, in five years time.

“Edith and the Ocean Dome”: “Where is My Mind,” The Pixies

This song is about disorientation. And Edith may be one of my most disorientated characters. She distances herself from both her personal life and her professional work. The people and things that attract her also repulse her. She’s an oceanographer, and the sea opens up before her as both a comforting and a frightening presence. And so I have to love the lyrics, “I was swimmin’ in the Caribbean / Animals were hiding behind the rocks.”

“The Cellar”: “The Pact (I’ll Be Your Fever),” The Villagers

This song pushes us into our past and into our future all at once. And so my husband and I can’t help but be blown away by it each time it plays—and especially now, sitting together on the couch with our boys asleep just upstairs. We know it’s cheesy, but we don’t care. I wanted to end my collection full-circle. With “The Cellar,” I wanted to show how to be lost and how to be found, how to try to make sense of it all—that roving stretch of our lives. And when I listen to music and dance with my family, these are always the things that I search for in the melody and the beat and the rhythm and the refrain and the words that I sometimes don’t know—something to push us forward and pull us back all at once, beautifully.

Sarah Gerkensmeyer and What You Are Now Enjoying links:

the author’s website
excerpt from the book (“Dear John” at Guernica)

Center for Literary Publishing review
The Coffin Factory review
Hayden’s Ferry review review
Midwestern Gothic review

Fiction Writers Review interview with the author
The Observer profile of the author
The Quivering Pen guest post by the author
TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog review
Writer Unboxed guest post by the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane vividly covers the years leading up to the civil war in Sri Lanka through the inhabitants of one diverse neighborhood, and deftly blends beauty with sorrow to produce an unforgettable book.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Freeman’s gift for verisimilitude is manifest with searing clarity . . . And in fictionalizing Sri Lankan history, Freeman accomplishes what reportage alone cannot: she blends the journalist’s loyalty to fact with impassioned imagination.”

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don’t have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In her own words, here is Ru Freeman’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel, On Sal Mal Lane:

I wrote the entire first draft of On Sal Mal Lane, which had come into its name by then, after being Good People for awhile and then A Bend in the Road, at Yaddo. It was my first residency, and the only other time I’d spent away from home and among creative people had been at Bread Loaf which meant I was among people who may have played the occasional guitar or fiddle, but were primarily writers. At Yaddo I met composers, painters, documentary film-makers, and critics, as well as writers. Each evening we would gather at the ornate dining table, drink each other’s wine, and talk about our work. The composers I met introduced me to some of the musical pieces that made it into this book, a classical education that reminded me of my own piano lessons as a child, as well as how I had cultivated a passable singing voice, or perhaps a certain confidence that my passable singing voice was still worth listening to. Much of the music in the book came from the interplay between these two forces: memory and education and these are a few of the compositions or songs that made their way into the novel itself.

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor Op. 27, No. 2

Popularly known as “The Moonlight Sonata,” this piece was composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1801 and was dedicated to his pupil, Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. I never learned how to play more than the first few pages, by my oldest brother, Arjuna, who was – and is – a gifted musician, would play the entire sonata, start to finish. I envied his facility with the instrument, though I was far too lazy to ever achieve that kind of skill and, frankly, lacked the talent to make it worth my while to even try. This sonata was one that my mother, like Mrs. Herath in the book, asked my brother to play on the first night of the riots in 1983, when our Tamil neighbors were sheltering in our home. It is interesting that Beethoven had instructed that the piece be played Quasi una fantasia, which means, “like a fantasty.” That evening, those days, and this music being played… we were all yearning for that fantasy, the one where all was well, where music mattered, where music could soothe and erase such terrible pain.

Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A Minor, Op. 59

Another popular composition by Beethoven, and known most recognizably as ‘Für Elise,’ I gave this piece to Devi, the youngest daughter, who plays an abridged version of it while her brother listens. This was also a piece of music I listened to a lot while growing up, though this time it was played by my other older brother, Malinda. He, like me, had no abiding interest in the piano, and in addition he had the weakest fingers of us all. Still, he chose music as his single elective for the G.C.E. O/L Examination, which meant he had to learn one piece of music by heart. Our piano teacher chose this one for him and our whole family had to listen to him practice it repeatedly, ad nauseum, the ta-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-laa…ta-la-la-laaa…ta-la-la-laaa ringing in our heads. He had the notes down, but he never managed to acquire the feeling beneath it and I realize now that I still hear his rendition of it when I think of this piece. It reminds me of the way an instrument can begin to feel monotonous when there is no passion behind the playing, and it reminds me of the quiet earnestness of this particular brother, a quality that found its way into Nihil.

Chopin’s Ocean Wave Etude, Op. 25 No. 10

This is a piece that captured the difficulty of what I was trying to do with this novel (to intimate everything that preceded and outlasted the tragedy that occurs, to give the immense sorrow of what happens down this lane its due place, and also keep sight of the lightness and innocence of children), while also reflecting the singular relationship between Nihil and Devi, between a brother who is trying to take care of a sister, and a sister just out of reach of his concerns. This particular etude is the longest of Chopin’s etudes, and is one of the most difficult to play, middle notes being held while octaves are being played around those notes, and the pace quickening and deepening intermittently. It was a perfect representation of all the impossibles that were hurtling toward the characters in the book, in smaller or greater measure.

“The Maple Leaf Forever”

This was an anthem (the unofficial Canadian one, composed by Alexaner Muir), that I learned as a child, along with “The Star Spangled Banner,” (all the verses, oh yes), “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and “God Save the Queen,” among others. We Sri Lankans have a real passion for the stirring ecstasy of patriotic fervor and, it seemed, at least in my house and as far as my mother was concerned, a disregard for the larger realities that may have yielded some of these war-celebrating lyrics. I had a particular affection for the notion of “the thistle, shamrock, rose” entwining “the maple leaf forever,” perhaps because of the way it invoked a tapestry to me, some pretty, colorful embroidered fabric that was beautiful. In the book, Suren, the oldest Herath boy, the musician in the family sings the opening lines to the Bolling girls, his response to their question about whether his parents fought. I think this came to me because in my own volatile family, we did have this strange caesurae in the midst of my parents’ battles with each other, that were punctuated with singing.

“Flow Gently Sweet Afton”

This was originally a lyrical poem written by Robert Burns, which was later set to mysic by Jonathan E. Spilman. The poem describes the river Afton, which flows north from Alwhat Hill in the Carsphairn and Scaur Hills, in Ayrshire, Scotland. For reasons best known to the Irish nuns who once set the music curriculum at the Holy Family Convent that my grandmother, mother, and lastly I attended, “Flow Gently Sweet Afton,” was a necessary part of my education and I learned to sing of a girl named Mary who was sleeping by these waters that I did not know of, in a country I had not visited, with great sentiment. It is a very lovely melody, actually, and my mother would sing it as a lullabye, something I also learned to do. I gave this song to Rose, a somewhat scruffy, ragamuffin of a girl in the book, who only learns to articulate her consonants and vowels perfectly when she is taught this song.

“Forever Young,” by Alphaville

Oh my. Everything came to Sri Lanka a lot later than it does now – yes, I grew up in a time of no gmail and Macbooks – and this one I heard first on the top-forty run down on the radio at a friend’s house. I loved the lyrics and would sing it anytime I could as a sort of personal anthem, the angst-filled bemoaning of the violence around me (very real), that I did not quite understand and did not want to understand either. All I ever wanted to do then was to wear blue jeans and sweatshirts, because that’s what American girls wore, I’d heard, and sing songs like these as I strutted down the narrow streets of my neighborhood, or went to get bread from the bakery. I had a red and grey striped t-shirt that had a tiny picture of Snoopy over where my heart would be, and I remember very vividly that everytime I put on that shirt, this song would come to mind. I know, utterly hilarious now, but back then this song encompassed everything: desire, imagination, predicament, anti-establishment/parent outcry, wild independence, everything. It still does. And it seemed only right that the children of Sal Mal Lane, in the throes of their rebellion against their parents, and their celebration of their friendship with each other, ought to be allowed to sing this particular song during their forbidden variety-show.

“Kalu Kella,” by Indrani Perera

This is a popular Sri Lankan song, and one my mother sang to me as a child. I was not considered a pretty girl, being very dark-skinned in a country that liked girls to be what we call “fair” (i.e. light-skinned), and boys to be dark. This song, written for a dark-skinned girl is all about how beautiful she is; her radiance lights up the room and soothes the hearts of those who behold her; her demeanor and acts are compassionate and wrapped in good cheer; and in all these ways she is better and more beautiful than those other fair-skinned/white girls. Maybe it was because I had this song sung to me so often that I went from considering myself positively hideous to considering myself far more beautiful than I actually am, when the truth is somewhere in between! It also so happened that when I was home for my wedding to a Caucasian American, a band suddenly struck up at our dining table at the hotel we were at, and with broad smiles they began to sing this particular song which they didn’t know he already knew because I had sung it to him. In the book the song is requested by Devi, who behaves some of the time as I did as a little girl, and whose dark-skin and boyish looks are noted with some disparagement by one of the neighbors.

“Where the Streets Have No Name,” U2

I first heard of U2 when my oldest brother began to play “Mothers of the Disappeared,” on his guitar. We didn’t have a radio at this time, but someone had procured a cassette-player with head-phones and I would turn up the volume on The Joshua Tree, and lie on the cool cement floor of my bedroom, to counter so many kinds of heat: the physical, from the searing afternoons, the conflicts between my parents, my sense that I was losing my brothers who were grown up enough to leave the house for extended periods of time, and the violence building and raging outside our homes both the escalation of the battle with the LTTE and the government crackdown on the left-wing uprising from the South which lead to so many disappearances and brutal murders of many young people. Those first raging lines, “I want to run/ I want to hide/ I want to tear down the walls/ that hold me inside/ I want to reach out/ and touch the flame/ where the streets have no name,” they were everything I was feeling. Everything I had right there, I wanted to leave behind, I wanted to go where my brothers and their friends went, fight alongside them, chant slogans, bring down the government. This, even though the one I wanted to “go there with,” was my first love. So there was this love/politics romance in this song for me. In the book it is Suren who wants to add this particular song to the repertoire, but it is a song that spoke to what was beginning to happen down Sal Mal Lane among and around all the children who were both falling in love and beginning to understand fear and hatred.

Ru Freeman and On Sal Mal Lane links:

the author’s website
excerpt from the book

Boston Globe review
ForeWord Reviews review
Minneapolis Star Tribune review
Oprah.com review
Publishers Weekly review

Bookslut interview with the author
The Diane Rehm Show interview with the author
The Nervous Breakdown self-interview with the author
Publishers Weekly review

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

This weekend, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park hosts its second annual GoogaMooga food festival, and I am interviewing Michael Moss there tomorrow about his fascinating book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.

For a chance at winning this book and a 0 Threadless gift certificate, share your favorite guilty pleasure food in a comment. Cheese is easily my foodstuff kryptonite, in any and all forms.

One winner, chosen randomly from the commenters, will receive the following prizes:

Michael Moss’s book Salt Sugar Fat

A 0 Threadless gift certificate to buy book-related t-shirts like Storytellers, The Best Channels Since 1465, Fahrenheit 451, Brainy Rainbow, or Word!, and music-related t-shirts like Death Note, Funkalicious, Music Snob, or anything else that catches your fancy.

If you have already have this book or it doesn’t interest you, I am happy to substitute a second 0 Threadless gift certificate.

The winner will be chosen randomly at midnight ET Friday evening (May 24th).

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous and ongoing contests at Largehearted Boy

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week’s new comics)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
Daily Downloads (daily free and legal music downloads)
Largehearted Word (highlights of the week’s book releases)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily links from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture)

Largehearted Boy

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Ben Greenman’s new novel The Slippage is a perceptive and eloquent depiction of suburbia and marriage.

The Kansas City Star wrote of the book:

“His sharp insights into suburban claustrophobia and impotent rage are highlighted by striking images and well-tooled prose.”

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don’t have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In his own words, here is Ben Greenman’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel, The Slippage:

In the past I have written book notes for What He’s Poised to Do and A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both, collections of short stories that came out in 2010 and 2007. This time, the book in question is called The Slippage, and it’s a novel, and it’s coming out as we speak from Harper Perennial. Other books I’ve written have been, sometimes, manic with regard to imagination, incontinent in various ways. This one is more controlled, largely because of its plot—it’s the story of a forty-something couple in a possibly failing marriage in the suburbs, and a stretch of life during which the woman, Louisa, asks the man, William, to build her a new house. The suburbs are a major character: they help create a sense of emptiness and silence that gives the characters plenty of space to reflect but also oppresses them. As a result, I have picked songs about the suburbs, more or less.

The Kinks, “Shangri-La” (1969)

It’s rare to be able to pinpoint an exact starting point for a writing project, but I know that this book had its start in this song, and specifically in a line that Ray Davies wrote that I think about all the time: “And all the houses in the street have got a name / Cause all the houses in the street they look the same.” That’s a perfect compression of one of the main ideas here, which is how we distinguish ourselves from one another. Our insides may be different (by insides here, I mean desires, fears, ambitions) but the skins are very similar. The suburbs is a particularly accurate illustration of this principle.

Dionne Warwick, “A House is Not a Home” (1964)

I named the second section of the book after this song. It seemed like a no-brainer: It’s one of the towering achievements of the decade, possibly the best Bacharach-David composition. And it’s thematically pertinent as well. A structure is only a structure, meaningless unless filled by meaning. William and Louisa, the central couple in my book, struggle with this distinction repeatedly, in the house where they live, in the house where they may one day live, and in many other houses they visit along the way.

The Residents, “Suburban Bathers” (1980)

It seems strange to write a more traditional work and then go looking to the Residents for inspiration. On the other hand, if you were going to pick a Residents album that follows conventions while at the same time subverting them, you’d pick Commercial Album. “Suburban Bathers” also makes some superb observations about self-knowledge: “If I’d learn to love myself / I might survive the murky depths.”

Carole King, “My Simple Humble Neighborhood” (1975)

King’s song is about the magic of home, the sense of hope that comes from comfort, the joys of dreaming big. My characters deal with their neighborhood differently. For starters, they’re adults, not children, which means that their souls have ossified to some degree as a result of work and disappointment. Also, there’s more responsibility than comfort, more pressure than freedom. These things reverse the circuit.

Ween, “So Many People In the Neighborhood” (2003)

This is the counterweight to the Carole King song above: there’s no Really Rosie here, only really creepy faces peering from behind curtains, and the title repeated until it become a slogan and then a threat, and a final lyrical burst about “socks and locks and cocks and rocks.” Those are, as everyone knows, the four building blocks of deceptive domesticity.

Tim Hardin, “If I Were A Carpenter” (1967)

I have written books that were overtly about music, like Please Step Back (a funk-rock novel about a fictional Sly Stone-type musician in the 1960s and 1970s), and books where music was referenced often (like Superbad or Celebrity Chekhov). In this book, there’s only one song mentioned overtly, and it’s this one. William is sitting on the deck and hears it coming out of a portable radio. The lyrics strike him as lyrical but also incomprehensible, a kind of poetry that doesn’t solve anything in his increasingly claustrophobic life.

Jonathan Richman, “The Neighbors” (1983)

I was mindful throughout this book of not straining for effect, either via image or form or metafictional trickery. I wanted, to the degree that it was possible, to be straightforward about things. Is that what Jonathan Richman does? You could say that, though you could also say that he appears to do that while doing the diametric opposite. This song relates a dialogue between Jonathan and a woman in which his presence in her house presents some problems. He’s worried that if anyone sees him leaving, they might tell his wife, and that would create marital discord. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to let the neighbors run his life. My main character, William, faces a very similar situation, but he is not holding a guitar.

Little Richard, “Slippin’ and Slidin’” (1956)

Recently, at an event, a woman I knew came up to me and asked me if she was the only one who thought the title of my book, The Slippage, sounded dirty. She wasn’t. When the title was first announced, a British man wrote me to tell me that it was slang for screwing. I defer to Little Richard. Is there a more exciting, breakneck song about attraction and risk? No man can resist a solid sender.

Ben Greenman and The Slippage links:

the author’s website
the author’s Wikipedia entry

Chicago Tribune review
Kansas City Star review
New York Observer review
New York Times review

Believer interview with the author
Cultist profile of the author
Forbes interview with the author
Interview Magazine interview with the author
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for What He’s Poised to Do
Miami Herald interview with the author
The Millions contributions by the author
Page Views profile of the author
The Rumpus interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Julie Wu’s compelling debut novel The Third Son works on many levels, as immigration tale, historical fiction, and pitch perfect love story.

The Boston Globe wrote of the book:

“Twin dramas — an unusually awful sibling rivalry, a stunningly pure and inspiring love story — center a book that spans decades and continents. This is a deceptively simple, deeply compelling debut.”

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don’t have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In her own words, here is Julie Wu’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel, The Third Son:

The Third Son Sings

In the process of writing the first draft of my debut novel, The Third Son, I listened to boxfuls of CDs of Taiwanese folk songs. Some were familiar to me because my parents had sung them at home, or more accurately in my father’s case, in the garage, which he enjoyed because of the way it amplified his already ringing baritone. Since I don’t read Chinese, I asked my parents to translate the lyrics of songs I recognized or liked, and I sprinkled several of them through my first draft.

In subsequent drafts, I worked on unity both in the actual text and the songs I used within it. I included two well-known Taiwanese folk songs: one that was historically important, and one that integrated perfectly with the structure of my book. I also showed a contrast between the singing of the Republic of China’s national anthem in Taiwan, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the United States.

“Rainy Night Flower” – Taiwanese folk song


In The Third Son, Taiwanese dissidents sing “Rainy Night Flower” in the streets. Of all the Taiwanese folk songs my parents sang when I was growing up, “Rainy Night Flower” was the one after which my mother would put her hand over her heart and shake her head. “This song means so much the Taiwanese people,” she would say. “Only Taiwanese know what this song means, how much we suffered.”

She translated it for me:

Rainy Night Flower
Blown to the ground by the wind and rain
No one sees you or heeds you
When you fall, you will never return to life.

A lovely, simple tune. Too bad about the dire lyrics, I thought.

I was American born and raised. My parents’ dinnertime anecdotes, while including references to difficult times during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the subsequent takeover by the Chinese Nationalists, who established the seat of the Republic of China in Taipei, did not fully explain to me why a song this bleak would speak so strongly to the Taiwanese people.

It was only when I was an adult that I learned that my parents’ anecdotes were sanitized for children’s ears. It turned out that the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists had each killed 10,000-20,000 Taiwanese soon after gaining power over the island, and the Nationalists continued to execute and incarcerate undocumented thousands of people at will for forty years. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one in the dark about Taiwan’s tragic history; both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists had done a rather superb job of covering everything up. The United States, allied with the Nationalists against Communist China, was happy to go along with the cover-up.

The resonance of “Rainy Night Flower,” then, is not so much with the fact that the titular flower is dying, but with the fact that it is dying unseen and unheard. When Taiwanese dissidents sang “Rainy Night Flower” in the streets in 1949, they risked their lives. Singing any song publicly in Taiwanese was illegal at the time, as it was forbidden to use Taiwanese dialect rather than the Mandarin Chinese imposed by the Nationalists. Singing this folk song in particular was an obvious act of rebellion, along with many others that the government wanted to and, as I describe in The Third Son, did suppress.

“Repairing the Fisherman’s Net” – Taiwanese folk song


As a musician myself, I have often thought of musical structure while writing. In The Third Son I wanted to use sequential stanzas of a folk song to help secure the book’s structure. I wanted a song that echoed the themes of the book, that followed its progression, and that had a happy ending. But the vast majority of the Taiwanese folk songs I found had, like “Rainy Night Flower,” unending stanzas of doom and despair.

I found, at last, “Repairing the Fisherman’s Net.” The first stanza is bleak, of course, but the narrative progresses in a way that dovetails perfectly with my story, and different characters sing the song’s stanzas at key moments throughout the book:

Looking at the net, my eyes redden—such a hole!
I want to repair it but have not a thing.
Who knows my pain?
If we let it go today, our future is hopeless.

Alone and miserable, my lover has gone hiding.
I sew but have trouble controlling the needle and thread.
My long needle connects West and East.
My thread is a bridge to the Milky Way.

The sky clears after the rain, fish fill the harbor.
We are the happiest couple in the world.
Today’s reunion warms our hearts.
We need never repair the broken net again.

The National Anthem of the Republic of China and “The Star Spangled Banner”


The main character of The Third Son, Saburo, travels from Taiwan to the United States, and one of the shocking things he notices is that the majority of Americans cannot sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” from memory. Having been forced to hear and sing the National Anthem of the Republic of China several times a day, he could most definitely sing it in his sleep and couldn’t forget the words no matter how hard he tried. And thus he does not view the casual ignorance of Americans as collective stupidity, but as exhilarating proof of a lack of autocratic control. Every time a born-and-bred American mixes up “O’er the ramparts we watched” with “What so proudly we hailed” is to him one more example of how, in America, we are free to do and to sing whatever we like. Even “Rainy Night Flower.”

Julie Wu and The Third Son links:

the author’s website
excerpt from the book

Boston Globe review
Fiction Writers Review review
Kirkus Reviews review

Bookmagnet’s Blog interview with the author
Taipei Times profile of the author
Taiwanese American interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Vividly told and meticulously researched, Amy Brill’s The Movement of Stars is one of the year’s finest debut novels.

Kirkus Reviews wrote of the book:

“Probing yet accessible, beautifully written and richly characterized: fine work from a writer to watch.”

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don’t have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In her own words, here is Amy Brill’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel, The Movement of Stars:

“A Hundred Years Ago” – Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd

Every day at sea is an eternity when love is left behind. As Isaac writes to Hannah in the book: “Your lesson—that time and distance are the same thing, at sea?…I understand this. Not only in my mind. But in my self. The longer I am away from my home, the farther I feel from it.”

“The Creator Has a Master Plan” – Brooklyn Funk Essentials

The era in which I got the idea for the novel is wrapped up with my life in Brooklyn. I was in my mid-twenties, the same age as my protagonist—and, like her, I was looking for meaning in life, waiting for something important to happen, often at night, though not so much in the sky. I hoped to find my soulmate, to find my voice, to tell great stories and find great adventure. I looked far and wide—Bali, Australia, Greece, Israel, Thailand, Mexico, seeking faith in a future that would deliver all that I yearned for. This song captures that moment in time.

“You Learn” – Alanis Morrisette

I recommend biting off more than you can chew to anyone. Back in those days (mid 90s) the idea seemed romantic, unreachable, gleaming in the distance: a novel. In those days we were all screaming and sweating and striving. Grrl rock and spoken word, underground sets in a NYC neighborhood in which meat was still packed. We saw jam bands at Wetlands and Tramps, we danced at bob and at the Prospect Park bandshell, we said and did inappropriate things to and with the wrong people. And some of us moved to Cape Cod for the summer, to work in a bookstore and be a “writer.” That summer an idea came my way that took fifteen years to come to fruition. Feel free. I did.

“Mr. Big Stuff” – Jean Knight

As characters and themes began to take shape in my pages, I invented a mentor for my character whose interest would turn salacious. I probably overwrote Hannah’s rage and despair as she realizes that her mind is second to her body in terms of how the (male) world regards her. But those feelings were truthful to my own experience with men whose interest in my “career” or my “work” or my job application or my pitch boiled down to an interest in something else entirely. I, at least, had recourse. I could quit the job (I did), or pitch my articles elsewhere (obviously). But my character had few options. Her devastation is real because her circumstances were so limited. Mr. Big Stuff, tell me… Who do you think you are?

“Grey Funeral Line” – Jolie Holland

The melancholy and longing of separated lovers is a deep and resonant theme of the book. I was profoundly moved by the letters I read that passed between husbands and wives, young lovers, mothers and sons thousands of miles and years apart. That distance was devastating at a time when life was so fragile. Parents, children, lovers died regularly. This song captures the vulnerability and loneliness of life at sea and back home that runs through the book, and through the whole history of seafaring men and the families they left behind.

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” – U2

Reckoning with faith is another theme that runs through my book, and through my life. In Hannah’s case, she struggles to reconcile her religious faith with her divergent feelings and desires. When I consider faith in my own life I tend to think more about the dueling forces of ego and vulnerability, confidence and disquiet. I think, too, of the long road to true love, the deepening that happens when one creates a family, the ceaseless tide of need and offer, pull and push, take and give. This song tends to gather and briefly reconcile all of those feelings for me. How I love it.

“Astral Weeks” – Van Morrison

As I crept further into my thirties, I began applying for—and to my surprise, being accepted to—artist residencies. I spent months in magical locales, surrounded by nature and other artists, and these experiences contributed greatly to the development of my work. They gave me unencumbered space in which to walk and dream, make connections and read as much as I could hold. They gave me other artists to talk to, who—bless them!—told me things I needed to hear, even when I didn’t want to hear them. The spiritualism of this song—the whole album, really—it’s impressionistic, rough-hewn, abstract beauty—stirs a melancholy wonder that I equate with artistic growth and my own maturing sense of what art—and love—require of the participant.

“Haul on the Bowline” – A. L. Lloyd

Life aboard a whaleship* was never pretty or easy, but in the 18th and first few decades of the 19th century, ships were owned and crewed mostly by local men for whom an 18-month or two-year whaling voyage was a right of passage and a viable career path. By midcentury, though, the brutal, hazardous, business of whalehunting got even worse: four-year journeys to distant whaling grounds, crews comprised of anyone an agent could press into service. A haul, indeed.

*If you must know: This is how a whaleship operated: The ship would leave an Eastern port, usually Nantucket or New Bedford, and travel east across the Atlantic, often stopping at the Azores (then called the “Western Islands”) to stock up on supplies or crew members, and from there proceed south, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to whaling grounds that could be as far off as the Pacific or the Arctic. Once a whale was sighted by the watch (“Thar’ she blows!”), they’d lower the boats, row out to the whale, waiting for it to ascend, then harpooning it with a line attached to the blade, and holding on for dear life while the whale descended and swam for its life; when the whale came up for air, the crew would harpoon it to death, and float it back to the boat, where they would carve it up and boil the blubber in a tryworks on board, filling thousands of barrels of oil on each journey.

“First Day of My Life” – Bright Eyes

If these things take forever I especially am slow. This song was on a compilation my girlfriends made as a gift for my bridal shower. I was 37 years old, and I had been certain that I’d never meet the one. Then I did. It had been a crazy year. Iberia lost a backpack full of research for my novel on a flight home from Spain, where I’d been on residency. Devastated, I ignored my manuscript for months, sure I’d never be able to write Hannah without my journals and notes about the real woman who inspired her. About six months after I first heard this song about fresh starts and new beginnings, I was married …and newly pregnant. Talk about the first day of the rest of your life. That’s when I realized that I couldn’t leave my book behind. As it turned out, losing my research was the best thing that ever happened to my book. It freed me to leave the facts behind, and tell the story I wanted to tell, even if it meant starting all over again.

“Burn Thru” – Abigail Washburn

Hey I’m trying so hard

To see the light

To see the light

To see it burn thru

This song came out around the time I finished writing The Movement of Stars. The two preceding years had been the hardest of my life. As a new mother I was struggling to swim up to the surface of what felt like a deep, dark sea of work and responsibility and overwhelming love. I was heavy with longing and guilt, sure that I wasn’t a good enough mother, or writer, or wife. For fifteen years, I’d been waiting for the day that I could say I was finished with my novel. That I’d done my best, that I’d worked as hard as I could, that I’d told the story I set out to tell. That I understood my character and all her perplexing, conflicted desires and beliefs. That day came about a month after City of Refuge, the album this song is on, was released. This is the song that speaks to that time for me, as it speaks to Hannah’s determination to find that bright object in the night sky that would change her life. I still cry when I hear it.

“Our Gallant Ship” – The Revels, The Revels Children

Three times around went our gallant ship, and she sunk to the bottom of the sea.

Amy Brill and The Movement of Stars links:

the author’s website

Kirkus Reviews review
Oprah.com review
Publishers Weekly review
USA Today review

BookPage essay by the author
Brooklyn Daily Eagle interview with the author
CarolineLeavittville interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Jessica Soffer’s Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is an exceptional novel, filled with well-wrought characters and sharp, beautiful prose. This profound story of two lonely people who find common ground in food, told in Soffer’s singular voice, is unforgettable.

Library Journal wrote of the book:

“This powerful debut sheds light on the meaning and power of family, whether its members are blood-related or “created” by nonrelatives. Food is what strengthens relationships here, particularly the search for specific recipes. Young, troubled Lorca lives in New York City; her distracted mother, a chef, is rather uninterested in Lorca’s psychological troubles; her estranged father lives in New Hampshire. Researching how to prepare an unusual meal, Lorca feels she can win her mother’s interest and love if she can prepare this delicacy. She meets Victoria, who once owned a restaurant specializing in Iraqi meals. Their cooking lessons lead to confided morsels of their own pasts. However, it is not just the love of food but understanding and acceptance that help to make this such a lovely novel.”

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don’t have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In her own words, here is Jessica Soffer’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots:

I am obsessed with rhythm. I’m an awful poet, play no instruments, and wish I were a better singer, but I’ve always been taken with the music of things. Perhaps it has something to do with growing up in New York City, the relentless orchestra: radiators on the xylophone, garbage trucks idling on the bass, wrecking ball on the triangle, vacuum upstairs on first violin. You’ve got to find a way to harmonize with the noise, or implode. I suppose I’ve come to rely on it. In a perfect world, I’d be a Raelette and a flamenco dancer on weekends: rhythm in my bones, and for a living. But, the world is far from perfect. And here I am, at my desk, in my slippers, typing to the tune of a car alarm, trying to get it right. Right. Right. Right-uh.

It is probably unsurprising then that music has everything to do with writing for me. I listen while I write. I write while I listen. My first novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, was built to the rhythm, for the rhythm, because of the rhythm of a very wonderful set of songs.

There are those (1) that I listened to while actually writing—as I sat, hands on keys, ass in chair, earbuds ensconced and there are others (2) that I listened to extracurricular-ally, while living—hands off keys, hands on doorknobs, hands soapy and scrubbing a pan—that either informed a scene or character or mood or feels, in retrospect, like they should have.

(1)

“Big Red Machine” by Aaron Dessner & Justin Vernon

Plot does not come naturally to me. At a certain point in the process, I realized that music could help. When I listen to a tune that bristles with foreboding, that moves along at a steady clip, that builds and surges, the writing seems—on good days—to snap to, and follow suit. This song is just right for that: arresting but unaggressive, significant but not hyperbolic. It’s gorgeous. And the final lines feel so appropriate for the characters in Apricots. “That’s all I’ve learned: to suffer.”

“Waltz for Debbie” by Bill Evans String Quartet

Because this song is charming but not sanguine, full of forward momentum but not cataclysmic, it was my go-to tune for writing the unassuming sections of Apricots. If this song were an activity, it would be walking around town, doing errands. It’s awful to think of any section of the novel as merely functional, but. Noted. Won’t happen again.

“Ivy” by Active Child

This song draws my focus along as if by the pull of a very sturdy thread. I’m wary of dissecting why too terribly much lest the magic wear off. And it is magic. At least until the phone rings. Or my stomach growls. Or it’s too cold in here. Or shiny thing.

(2)

“Redford (For Yia-Yia & Papou)” by Sufjan Stevens

For me, this is a song about death, which is something that the characters of Apricots are constantly swerving around. It’s poignant, compelling and completely devoid of fanfare. After one character’s husband dies, she keeps wondering when the explosion will happen. Any kind. And it doesn’t. The most shocking part about death for her (for everyone?) is that life doesn’t skip a beat.

“Hope There’s Someone” by Antony and The Johnsons

The two main narrators in Apricots need and want so much from each other. Antony’s voice is suspended with that same kind of hope—and his lyrics reveal the stuff that’s deeper: the desperation. This song might be overstating the point a bit, but there’s nothing quite as heartbreaking as finding oneself and/or feeling utterly, devastatingly alone.

“Sweet Disposition” by The Temper Trap

Someone passed this along and I felt like I’d discovered the cure for melancholy. Turned out, everyone had been listening to this song until their ears bled, was still melancholy, and I’d just been living under a rock. Still, it feels like the essence of young love to me, at least from the perspective of Apricots’ teenage narrator, Lorca. It’s so eager, so wide-eyed that it belongs in a streetlight love scene, which is also, often, where teenagers feel they belong, too.

“Al Atlal” by Umm Kulthum

Umm Kulthum (a.k.a. Oum Kalthoum, Om Kalsoum) is an Arabic music legend and her songs would have been playing at The Shohet and His Wife, an Iraqi restaurant at the core of Apricots’ storyline. This song makes me think of Iraqi women in lots of pattern and magenta silk, dancing and clucking and clapping as something orange and heavily spiced simmers in the kitchen.

“Just Breathe” by Pearl Jam

Longing, regret, death: all so much a part of Apricots. And for Lorca, a pain addict, Vedder’s particular lyric—”There’s so much in this world to make me bleed”—really says it better than I ever could, than I did. Too late. Fail again. Fail better.

Jessica Soffer and Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots links:

the author’s website

Library Journal review
The Millions review
New York Journal of Books review
Publishers Weekly review

Author Recipe Blog guest post by the author
The Atlantic interview with the author
Jewish Daily Forward profile of the author
Library Journal interview with the author
My Book, The Movie guest post by the author
Publishers Weekly essay by the author (on the 10 best book endings)
The Quivering Pen essay by the author
Writers Read guest post by the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Fiona Maazel’s Woke Up Lonely is a vibrant, engaging, and endlessly inventive exploration of loneliness, and is easily one of the year’s finest novels.

Marie Claire wrote of the book:

“It’s as if a Paul Thomas Anderson movie married a David Foster Wallace novel and had a baby. Which is to say, this story is weird, thrilling, and inimitable.”

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don’t have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In her own words, here is Fiona Maazel’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel, Woke Up Lonely:

I can’t listen to music when I write. If I listen to music, I end up listening, and since I can’t even drive a manual vehicle, this requiring of me too many actions at once, imagine me trying to listen and write at the same time. I can, however, listen to music before I work, which is what I generally do. I can put words on paper whenever I want, but if I want them to be any good, I need to be able to lay bare my inner life and to be as vulnerable about it as possible. And since I’m generally a guarded person—someone once told me my defenses were gothic in terms of their rigor and intricacy—finding ways to shed the armor often includes listening to music. Okay, sometimes I just think of whatever painful things have happened to me until I get just upset enough. Sometimes I’ll read some short fiction I find especially moving. But mostly I’ll listen to music because music is penetrating and immutable insofar as I can’t dilute its power of effect.

“Lonelier Than This” – Steve Earle

In the way of research for Woke Up Lonely, I read a lot of books on the topic of loneliness and solitude. But I also listened to a lot of music on the subject, which turns out to comprise ninety percent of the music out there. While writing the novel, I listened to this song compulsively and was struck dumb by Earle’s notion of people calling out to each other in vain: “Maybe this is as good as it’s gonna get and I’ll always be this way. I’ll just wander this world callin’ out your name.” Seemed like a great way to describe what loneliness feels like—the hopelessness of it all. The pathos. So it’s no coincidence that throughout the novel, references to calling out for each other abound.

“Darker with the Day” – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

I’m wild about Nick Cave. His nasty phase, his ballad phase, his acutely religious phase—whatever he does, I’m interested. There was a time when I listened to No More Shall We Part obsessively. It’s moody and even a little ridiculous, but also so committed to its own affectation that it wins me over every time. In my mind, Nick Cave and Thomas Hardy, who is one of my favorite authors, belong together—both engaged in contrivance and histrionics that still manage to stir me to a contemplation of bigger things.

“Candy Says” – Anthony & the Johnsons cover

Not sure there’s a better rendering of self-loathing out there—self-loathing and dread—as “Candy Says,” and when Anthony applies his tremolo, his flutter and transgendering aesthetic, he manages to alchemize shame into a kind of aura that lingers in the air well after the song’s over. This was useful for me to think about when trying to write about people who are estranged from themselves and how the shame of that estrangement can become pandemic.

“Always Already Gone” – The Magnetic Fields

I have a close friend in this band, so it’s always a little embarrassing to write about them, but I’m a huge fan! “It seems you were always already gone”—what a way to characterize the pathology of loneliness, of the person who is always already not there, and thus always apart from. We tend to think of loneliness afflicting the person who’s been left behind, but I like to think about the person who leaves compulsively. I am reminded of what Leonard Cohen once told an interviewer in the nineties about his failed romances: “I was unable to reply to their love. Because I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation, I couldn’t touch the thing that was offered me, and it was offered me everywhere.” When trying to write up one of the characters in my novel—the cult leader, Thurlow Dan—I had this idea in mind, that he be unreachable both by choice and birth.

“I Felt Your Shape” – The Microphones

I went through a big Microphones phase in the summer of 2008—which should give you a depressing sense of how long it took me to write this novel. I drove down to North Carolina to visit the astronomical research center featured at the end of the book. I stayed in a lovely cabin and spent a lot of time watching the humming birds and listening to this song.

“Woke Up New” – The Mountain Goats

None of this novel is autobiographical, but since it took me five years to write it, I was able to channel various traumas into its pages, among them having to part from someone important to me. I listened to this song during that time, impressed by what seems so fundamental about loss—the sense that even the little things seem unmanageable now that you are alone with them.

“The Bleeding Heart Show” – The New Pornographers

I wrote a chunk of this novel in Tucson, Arizona. One of the happiest months of my life. I’d get up at 4 or 5 in the morning and do some work, go running through the canyons around 8, then back to work until dinner. It was intense, but at the end of every day, I’d jump on my bike and ride around the city listening to the New Pornographers. In terms of unmediated experience, nothing rivals the high of bicycling around a beautiful place listening to “The Bleeding Heart Show,” and telegraphing that joy into the next day’s work. Because it’s not all gloom and doom on the page. Sometimes, exuberance is required. Exuberance has its place.

“All the World Is Green” – Tom Waits

If I could see anyone in concert, it’d be Tom Waits. I’m just waiting for the chance. In the meantime, his music has basically soundtracked multiple years of my life and these last few are no exception. “Pretend that you owe me nothing and all the world is green”—I weep almost every time I hear that line. Pretend all things are equal. Pretend there’s moral equity in the world. Pretend there are no discrepancies between people to resolve. Pretend the world is Edenic. You have only to think about where we are these days—politically, culturally, ethically—to find in these lyrics a much bigger indictment than Waits likely intended.

“Marry Me” – Syd Straw

I probably first heard this song at Fez, in NYC, which has since closed down. And I remember being just devastated by its lyric—its insistence on love as the thing that actually prevails. I happen to believe this, too, despite all evidence to the contrary, which often makes me feel embattled and terrified—of being alone with my faith, of being wrong. Much of Woke Up Lonely gathered strength from these twin anxieties. Incidentally, Syd Straw sang this song at a friend’s wedding. Their marriage has since broken up.

“Which Will” – Lucinda Williams

This is actually a Nick Drake song, but I like LW’s version better. Blasphemy, I know. But it’s a little more raw. A little more dire. If you won’t love me, who will you love?—again assuming that love is a given; only its object changes.

“Long Gone Lonesome Blues” – Hank Williams, Jr.

I cannot stand country music, though you’ll notice a couple of country singers on this list. I nearly named my novel after this song, except I didn’t want to undermine the book’s project by making it too sing-songy, or, you know, yodely. But I think there is an implicit rapport in American culture between the rugged male out there on his own tilling the land and notions of solitude and loneliness.

“True Love Will Find You in the End” – Beck

It will? Beck sounds so haggard on this track, it’s hard to believe him. Though I think that’s the point. I think he’s got a will to believe (via Daniel Johnston) that’s so hard-won—so hard to maintain—that it cost him his voice. Plus the song manages to iterate one of my favorite philosophical arguments on the topic of faith as put forth by the great William James in his lecture, “The Will to Believe,” in which he contends (in essence) that it’s not just okay but even a good idea to believe in something without evidence of its existence. For him, belief is a kind of self-fulfilling gesture (something like: build it and they will come) and also a precondition for getting the thing you believe in. By his logic, God will not reveal himself to you unless you have faith. Similarly, romance will not materialize in your life unless you believe in it first, and seek it out first. In short: Go, Beck. Or, more properly, go Daniel Johnston. Which is sad when you think about his life and its troubles, but I digress.

“Get Me” – Everything But the Girl

Tracey Thorne’s got an amazing voice. She’s probably best known for her more electro-pop stuff with Everything But the Girl, but I like their early stuff, too. It’s a little maudlin, but that’s okay. One of the central questions of Woke Up Lonely gets reprised in this song: Do you ever get me? Does anyone? Can anyone?

“Fall in Love With Me” – Iggy Pop

Remember that famous scene in Moonstruck when Nicholas Cage insists Cher just get in his bed? Wow, I bet no one’s ever grouped Cage, Cher, and Iggy Pop in the same thought, but never mind. When all else fails, when you’re done with the polemics and yawning, prolix deliberations on the topic of loneliness, just get adamant. Fall in love with me! Right now! Do it!

Fiona Maazel and Woke Up Lonely links:

the author’s website
the author’s Wikipedia entry
video trailer for the book

Kirkus Reviews review
Marie Claire review
The Philadelphia Review of Books review
Publishers Weekly review

Fiction Addiction interview with the author
New York Times essay by the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Benjamin Lytal’s debut novel A Map of Tulsa is a literary love letter to the city where the protagonist returns from college to truly discover his hometown.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Although the doomed girl is the focus of Jim’s obsession, the strength of this debut novel is Lytal’s evocation of place: Tulsa through Jim’s eyes is tenderly revealed. There is magic here if the reader has experienced any such provincial city, for the prose provokes remembered images, acutely vivid.”

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don’t have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In his own words, here is Benjamin Lytal’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel, A Map of Tulsa:

My book is about kids in love, so there’s a lot of important music. I want to offer three Warm-up playlists and then do a full-on annotated playlist essay for the Main Event.

First Warm-up

“Thick as Thieves” – The Jam
“California” – EMA
“Drugs in My Body” – Thieves Like Us
“Blue Jeans” – Lana Del Rey
“All My Friends” – LCD Soundsystem
“The Boys Are Back in Town” – Thin Lizzy
“Loft Music” – The Weeknd

This list is about youth, ad hoc party coalitions, adventures, pretend criminality, and night.

Second Warm-up

“Junco Partner” – James Booker
“Dank” – Arnold Schoenberg
“Suite en La” – J. P. Rameau
“Pastorale (in scordatura): Allegro” – Giuseppe Tartini
“Utah Dances” – Dave Soldier
“Cadenza on the Night Plain” – Terry Riley
“Hello Dolly” – Louis Armstrong (Berlin concert)

This list is about ecstasy, harshness, repetition, obsession, the idea of physical labor, and the transcending penetrating satisfaction of a performance climax.

Third Warm-up

“Free Money” – Patti Smith
“We’re In This Together” – Nine Inch Nails
“She” – Emmylou Harris
“She’s a Lady” – Pulp
“Pocahontas” – Neil Young
“Poor Song” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
“When My Boy Walks Down the Street” – The Magnetic Fields

This list is about legendary girlfriends, death, the desire for magical powers, and Custer’s last stand.

Main Event

This is the truest story I can tell using the playlist format. It’s about how I wrote the first draft of A Map of Tulsa. Here are four songs that are like landmarks in my memory:

“An den Wassern zu Babel” by Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir from Pärt: Da pacem

I wrote the first draft in Switzerland, where my fiancée had a fellowship. It was a dreary block of time. We lived outside of town, in a development across from a sheep farm. Every morning I sat down with my laptop and put on Arvo Pärt. I didn’t know how to write a novel. I watched the lambs play. It barely snowed that winter (the Alps are melting, you know). Pärt’s music is Christian, spectral, and yet feels completely modern and contemporary. It’s like a melting glacier. So it was the perfect thing to listen to while I drank coffee and let my brain thaw. The choir gave an aura of solemnity to my mornings, and made me feel less like a baby lamb, and more like a basso profundo.

“Let Me See the Colts” by Smog from A River Ain’t Too Much to Love

I also remember listening to Smog in Switzerland. Bill Callahan was like the buddy I needed: a self-confident drinker, a grim, grown-up little boy, a womanizer with a heart of gold. I took songs like “Prince Alone In the Studio” pretty seriously: here was Smog, a rough lo-fi genius, singing the ode to obsessive pop perfectionism. It seemed like this was how I should write—like one kind of person being the other.

We used to love “I Break Horses,” a slightly uptight dirge about keeping girls at a distance:

“Tonight I’m swimming to my favorite island. / And I don’t want to see you swimming behind. // I break horses. / I don’t tend to them.”

It sort of anticipates “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe.”

But later, this was after I moved back to Brooklyn, I settled on the more warbly, grown-up Callahan of “Let Me See the Colts”. A man who gets his friend out of bed so they can go look at sleeping colts. “Have you been drinking?” // “No, nor sleeping.” It’s about the need to feed on a vision of youth. He wants to see the colts that will run next year. He insists on exacting his own idea of aesthetic perfection out of the morning. “Is there anything as still as sleeping horses?” Some people might find it a boring song. But if you stay up all night working on something and then listen to it at dawn, it’s like the sunrise.

“Silver Stallion” by Cat Power from Jukebox

Another song about horses. I am still in Switzerland. Jukebox has just come out. Despairing, really, at the isolation of suburban Swiss life, I have taken money out of my very circumscribed debit account and bought train tickets to Paris. I have also spent on iTunes, to download the new Cat Power. I have not yet discovered credit cards. I have not yet discovered much about life, or writing. But gliding through the wintry landscape and looking at the leaden French grass, I realize one thing: I am never going to have a vaguely horseback love affair with a woman who thinks I have “razor blades and dice in [my] eyes.”

I wanted my book to be all books: I wanted it to contain that song, campy as it seemed. I wanted what Yeats calls “high romance.” It was on that train ride that I figured out that, deep as I could take them, Jim & Adrienne (my characters) were going to come out somewhere else. Chan Marshall’s song became a marker after that. I would listen to it in subsequent years of writing and it would symbolize a border: this is where I can’t get.

“Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis

It takes blood sugar to write. iTunes became so important to me in Switzerland. I started downloading pop singles out of a kind of patriotism: I missed the ambient radio soundtrack of New York, what my wife calls bodega music. This was towards the end of our stay. If Arvo Pärt represented the gravity of a moon landing, Leona Lewis was the silliness of the astronaut’s welcome home party. I was dying to get back to New York. I had finished a draft of my novel. I had carved an ice cave out of the blank white page. But just as we were preparing to leave (and I thought I was done) I got the idea of inserting some pinpricks of flashback into the story. These were liquid color, came easily, they were like draughts of the blushing south, as Keats might have said. It was spring, summer was coming: back in America I decided to turn those flashbacks into the gushing first half of the book.

Is it any wonder that Leona’s song is a defensive song? “But I don’t care what they say / I’m in love with you // My heart’s crippled by the vein that I keep on closing / You cut me open . . .”

Some people like the second half of my novel best; some people the first.

Benjamin Lytal and A Map of Tulsa links:

excerpt from the book

Austin Chronicle review
Boston Globe review
New York Observer review
New York Times review
Publishers Weekly review

KWGS interview with the author
Propeller interview with the author
Tulsa World profile of the author
Urban Tulsa Weekly profile of the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Book Notes (2012 – ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 – 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

Last December I spent several weeks writing an internal grant proposal, here at DePaul.  I was asking for a quarter’s leave from teaching to begin work on my long-overdue monograph about popular romance fiction, whose working title I’ve already used for an essay in the New Approaches collection:  How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance).  The title is supposed to play off the titles of all those introduction-to-poetry volumes on my office shelves, many of which are called something like “How to Read a Poem,” and I do, as a rule, romances the same way one reads, say, love sonnets:  closely and compositionally, in search of what poet Baron Wormser would call their “deep individuality.” I’m not sure the joke comes through, and I’m not wedded to the title, but I’m pretty well committed to taking a text-specific, differential approach to the genre, writing a book that demonstrates the vitality and intellectual excitement of close-reading, not “the romance,” but this romance, then that one, shifting our approach as needed to make each particular text come to life.

I’d like the book to introduce its readers to a bunch of late-20th and early 21st century British and American romance novels that I quite like, from a range of subgenres, from Christian inspirational novels to paranormal, erotic, and LGBTQ romance, with the focus of each chapter being one to three novels that I read in depth, attending both to internal complexity and to a novel’s dialogue with literary or cultural contexts.  Like each unit in my romance courses, each chapter in this book will have two overlapping goals:  to make the novel or novels seem as interesting as possible, and to model a particular reading practice, from allusion sleuthing to biographical criticism to the application of contemporary cultural theory.  The question that’s bedeviled me for years, of course, is what novels to choose, and although I had to come up with a proposed table of contents when I applied for the grant, I keep looking at it skeptically, painfully aware of the gaps in it.  (There are two or three authors I hope to glom over the summer, for example.)

Still, one must start somewhere–and I’m the sort of scholar who can’t start a big project without a vision of the whole in mind, even if I know that the final version may differ substantially from that initial model.  In the hope that I’ll get some useful feedback and suggestions, and maybe even some encouragement, here’s the outline I gave the committee.

They seemed to buy it:  they gave me the quarter off.  (Yay!)  What do you think?

Introduction:  What is a “Romance” and How do You Read One?  (Suzanne Brockmann’s The Unsung Hero).  This is my standard opening gambit in ENG 232 and graduate romance classes, and has been for several years.  The chapter on the history, aesthetics, and reception of “romance,” the “romance novel,” and the “popular romance novel” will be drafted on leave.

Chapter 1:  Sofa Paintings Don’t Make Good Art:  Gender, Art History, and the Defense of Romance in Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Natural Born Charmer.  Based on my Winter Quarter senior seminar on this metatextual novel, which couches its defense of the romance genre in debates over the visual arts (its heroine, Blue Bailey, is a painter, and ends the novel quite successful at selling her work), this chapter will bring in the work of sociologist Eva Illouz (on romance and capitalism) and possibly Lauren Berlant (on sentimentalism and American culture, if I can get a good handle on her work).

Chapter 2:  My Titillations Have No Footnotes:  Love and Allusion in Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love and Ann Herendeen’s Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander.  Based on my class notes on each of these novels, which I teach in ENG 232 and other romance courses, this is one of the chapters I hope to draft on leave–maybe.  I say “maybe” because there’s a second pairing that really appeals to me:  to consider Redeeming Love and Alex Beecroft’s False Colors side by side as Christian novels.  I spent a lot of time with the Beecroft this winter, and find the novel deeply moving and quite fascinating–she’s one of the authors I want to read more of this summer.  For now, she’s in chapter 4, below.

Chapter 3:  Instruction and Delight:  The Didactic Poetics of Beverly Jenkins and Katie Fforde.
It is widely (if not universally) acknowledged that many romance novels set about teaching their readers something that the author considers worth knowing, whether this is about an occluded historical moment (as in the case of African American romance novelist Beverly Jenkins) or about such qualities as optimism, emotional resilience, and happiness (as in the case of British romance novelist Katie Fforde).  The poetics of this teaching practice, however—how particular novels balance instruction and delight, or turn instruction to delight—have yet to be explored; that will be the subject of this chapter, although I’m not entirely sure that these will be the authors I choose, in the end.  Ideas from Thomas Roberts (Aesthetics of Junk Fiction) will be important here, and possibly the intersection between popular romance and “positive psychology,” although I think that’s a topic that Jennifer Crusie addresses more directly than either Jenkins or Fforde.

Chapter 4:  Beyond Edutainment: the Romance Novel as Problem Text (Jennifer Crusie’s Fast Women; False Colors, by Alex Beecroft).  These are books I know well, and love; I’ve proposed a talk that deals with both (among other books) for the “Radicalism of Romantic Love” conference in Canberra next November. The first explores the problem of marriage; the second, in an m/m context, is a profoundly religious novel, as focused on questions about the relationships between love, spirit, and flesh as John Donne’s “The Ecstasy” (which I sometimes teach alongside it).  Good stuff, both of them.

Chapter 5:  Isn’t it Just ‘Porn for Women’?  (Victoria Dahl, Start Me Up; Pam Rosenthal, The Slightest Provocation, Cara McKenna, Curio and The Curio Vignettes).  This chapter springs from the final unit in some of my recent romance courses, and centers on two topics:  the issue of Eros in popular romance fiction, which is sometimes handled with remarkable complexity; and the playful, self-conscious way that the texts I have chosen address the critical commonplace that popular romance fiction is, fundamentally, “pornography for women.”  The Dahl will certainly be there; the Rosenthal and McKenna, I’m not so sure.  Need to reread them, and explore some other possibilities, although I didn’t specifically ask my (Cathoic) university to fund that part of my research.

Chapter 6:  After the Deaths of Love and Poetry:  The Unlikely Art of Eloisa James.  This coming summer, before my leave begins, I have a research grant to write an essay / draft chapter on the deployments of poetry, poems, and poet-characters in the romance novels of Eloisa James.  As most of us probably know, “Eloisa James” is the pen name of Mary Bly, a Fordham professor of Renaissance literature and the daughter of poet Robert Bly; she is a uniquely situated author and theorist of the popular romance genre, and her theoretical discussions of the genre focus, not unsurprisingly, on the need for scholars to attend to authorial “unlikeness.”  Bly begins writing and publishing romance at a time when the “death of poetry” and the “death of eros” were being discussed in mainstream intellectual journals and newspapers, including The Atlantic and the New York Times; this chapter will explores the relationships between my major fields of research, poetry and popular romance, in a textually- and contextually-specific way.

Epilogue:  He Knew a Miracle When He Saw One:  Paradise Lost, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm.  Based on my essay about Flowers from the Storm in the New Approaches volume, this will close the book out with a tribute to what I still consider to be the most moving and most intellectually intriguing American romance novel, but I’d really love to situate the novel this time in something broader about Kinsale as an author.  We’ll see.

Would love any thoughts or suggestions!
Teach Me Tonight