April 6, 2022
Caleb Tankersley's Playlist for His Story Collection "Sin Eaters"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Awarded the 2021 Permafrost Fiction Book Prize, Caleb Tankersley's collection Sin Eaters is haunting and imaginative.
Julie Iromuanya wrote of the book:
"Sin Eaters uses an off-kilter approach to explore religion, faith, and the oddities of what it means to be human in a vast world beyond our grasp. These rich, highly imagined stories are deeply felt and emotionally resonant with a humor that sneaks up on you."
In his own words, here is Caleb Tankersley's Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Sin Eaters:
Sin Eaters is—in a nutshell—about jaded religion, burgeoning sexuality, and growing up. Many of these songs speak to one or more of those themes and inform the book. I was raised in a very evangelical environment as the son of a minister—a PK (Preacher’s Kid) in the lingo of the church. In late high school/early college I came to terms with the fact that I was gay, which threw my life and spiritual worldview for a loop. Music was a big part of my life, and I attended as many live shows as I could afford. The new music I discovered became a means of expressing my coming out, both in terms of sexuality and in emerging from a repressive religious culture without knowing where else to go or how else to be. Many of these songs speak to the struggle of religion, repression, and desire that marked my early life and shaped so many of the stories in Sin Eaters (which is why most of these songs are indie rock from the 2000s).
“Ready to Start” Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire’s music was extremely important to my younger, post-evangelical mindset. Many of their songs explore similar themes to the book, especially the albums Neon Bible and The Suburbs, which are both masterpieces. They sing songs of escape. (Sequoia Nagamatsu said “escape” was one of the main themes of my collection.) Arcade Fire’s music is so connected to the book’s idea of emerging out of religion that I’ve quoted from this song in the epigraph of the book. “Ready to Start” has a wonderful, propulsive drum and bass beat that gradually builds to a quiet explosion at the end of the song, the lyrics therein being “I would rather be wrong/ than live in the shadow of your song.” I remember repeating these lyrics to myself out loud on a midnight run. One of the ways I used to burn off extra energy/frustration was to go running alone at 11:00 PM or midnight. I loved hitting the pavement in the middle of quiet residential streets, feeling like the whole town was my own. During my midnight runs I used to listen to this entire album, beginning to end. (I very much respect the sanctity of the album, the journey of it, much like a story collection.)
“Kim & Jessie” M83
M83 is one of my favorite bands and is a staple of my daily playlist. My favorite M83 song is “We Own the Sky,” but that song moves to a slower, more low-energy rhythm. “Kim & Jessie” does a better job of capturing the youthful innocence that pops through in some of the book’s stories, especially “Candy Cigarettes” and “Ghosts on TV”: the fun, mysterious aspect of childhood, the sense of confinement contrasted with power and possibility. Upbeat but with bits of darkness around the edges. There’s M83 in a nutshell (especially their terrific concept album Before the Dawn Heals Us, my favorite album from them by far).
“Dear God, I Hate Myself” Xiu Xiu
There are many lovely songs on this album, also titled Dear God, I Hate Myself. Xiu Xiu does such a good job with chaotic weirdness, and many of their songs manage to capture a sense of irony, which is difficult to achieve in music. “Dear God, I Hate Myself” features all of these odd qualities alongside a sort of bouncy fun. (“Chocolate Makes You Happy” is another gem from the same album.) The song is driven by voice, a person spiraling into depression and discussing the ways in which they no longer recognized their own behavior, all contrasted against the strange crashing sounds in the background. This song connects to many of the “losing my religion” elements of the book. (And maybe this song takes the place of REM’s “Losing My Religion” in the playlist.)
“Flood” Jars of Clay
Through large parts of my childhood, I listened exclusively to Christian music. I followed Christian record labels, went to Christian festivals, and basically believed that the rest of my radio was filled with lesser music for weaker humans. (Hardcore evangelicalism is full of arrogance.) When I grew and woke up, one of the few Christian bands I continued to listen to was Jars of Clay. I began to appreciate how subversive their lyrics and themes were. Whereas many other Christian bands—then and now—churn out noxious, three-cord trash that portrays an overly positive world of rainbows, roses, and Jesus, Jars of Clay never shies away from real doubt, pain, and criticism. (Which is why they’re less accepted now by the closed-off Christian community.)
“Flood” opens with quiet acoustic verses interrupted by a powerful, booming chorus in which the singer vows to fight back against his own drowning. In an evangelical world that tells young, angsty teens they shouldn’t have anything to feel angsty about except the wicked influence of the flesh and the weak human world and that they only need to pray harder and harder and harder, a song that actually spoke to and validated that angst was invaluable.
“hell bent” Kenna
Kenna inhabits an interesting musical space outside genre, especially his first album New Sacred Cow, which contains “hell bent.” This song is airy and contemplative with a steady driving build that mirrors the emotional crescendos of the lyrics. “hell bent” focuses on the speaker’s attempts to escape the feeling of being controlled and become his own person. This was an album and song that a younger Caleb searching for himself deeply connected to. (“i’m gone” is another great song from this album that addresses the same themes in a more maniacal way.)
“Sam’s Town” The Killers
Sam’s Town is—in my opinion—The Killers’ best album, and the title song is a perfect encapsulation of its themes. “Sam’s Town” takes us through a series of confusing snippets of life in a small town, from the twisted to the downright absurd. (In the second verse Brandon Flowers sings “running through my veins/ An American masquerade.”) The chorus soars as the speaker screams out for escape from this surprisingly dark environment: “So why do you waste my time?/ Is the answer to the question on your mind/ And I’m sick of all my judges/ So scared of letting me shine” Growing up myself in a small town that was both comforting and claustrophobic, I related to the desperate striving this song and album project, which are some of the same emotional notes that I hope can be seen in stories like “Apparitions” or “The Feed Corn Sea.”
“Ode to My Next Life” Kishi Bashi
This song is vibrant and fantastical, almost like a space opera, all with an undercurrent of what the song calls “sad desire.” I love all of Kishi Bashi’s albums, but Sonderlust is definitely my favorite. “Ode to My New Life” in particular portrays that sense of energetic melancholy that I feel is a quintessential Kishi Bashi sound. In last year’s Spotify roundup, I was labeled as being in the top 0.5% of Kishi Bashi listeners, so it’s fair to same I’m a huge fan. He’s one of the few artists I would actually play as I’m writing to keep myself in a particular mood.
“Famous Last Words” My Chemical Romance
When My Chemical Romance released The Black Parade, I was smitten and fell into a brief but intense “emo” phase in my musical taste. That term has less meaning now than it used to, and many of the groups I listened to are no longer interesting to me. But My Chemical Romance endures as a consistently solid band I return to and love. Their inventive music transcends many of the stereotypes of “emo” music to become something more complex and singular (which also applies to Gerard Way’s shoegazer solo album Hesitant Alien).
To a new ex-vangelical such as my younger self, the dark themes and imagery of The Black Parade were appealing when paired with just how much fun the band seems to have. This whole album sounds like a blow-out Halloween party. “Famous Last Words” in particular is an anthem of defiance and perseverance through hardship and lost love, which certainly resonates with the book and with my own experiences. I’m still a (very) amateur runner, although I no longer go out at midnight. But when my energy is fading and I need a boost to get up a steep hill, this is the song I return to.
“Heads Will Roll” Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Continuing with artists who aren’t afraid to have campy fun with dark themes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll” is another song younger Caleb would listen to on repeat during a midnight run. Karen O’s voice is wonderfully smooth yet strained, as if each note is costing her some part of herself. The song builds to a wonderfully loud wall of guitar distortions, then drops to a softer section of Karen O whispering for listeners to close their eyes and follow her angelic voice through the looking glass. It’s a brief ethereal moment before the song returns to its opening, driving drumbeat. I love the movement in this song, and that underlying synth/organ sound feels like spending the night in a haunted church.
Caleb Tankersley is the author of the chapbook Jesus Works the Night Shift. His writing can be found in Carve, The Cimarron Review, Hobart, Sycamore Review, and more. He is the managing director for Split/Lip Press and lives near Seattle. Sin Eaters is his debut collection.
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April 6, 2022
Grant Ginder's Playlist for His Novel "Let's Not Do That Again"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Grant Ginder's novel Let's Not Do That Again is smart, hilarious, and one of the most fun books of the year.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"A new book from Ginder beckons the reader like a hot bath and glass of something, a reliable and relaxing pleasure. In this timely comic novel set in New York and Paris, a political family deals with drama past and present. Ginder aces the small stuff [and] the big stuff, characteristically insightful on sibling and parent-child relationships. Ooh la la, this book is a shoo-in."
In his own words, here is Grant Ginder's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Let's Not Do That Again:
My new novel, Let's Not Do That Again, chronicles the final eventful months of New York congresswoman Nancy Harrison’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. Her election should be a shoo-in, but when a video emerges of her daughter, Greta, throwing a champagne bottle through the window of a beloved Parisian bistro at the behest of a right-wing French extremist, Nancy’s all but assured victory is thrown into jeopardy. In a desperate attempt to save her political future, not to mention her daughter, Nancy dispatches her son, Nick, to wrest Greta free from the seductions of Paris and bring her back to New York. While on its surface it might seem like a political story, at its heart Let’s Not Do That Again is about is about the extraordinary sacrifices a mother and her children make for each other, and the difficult truths those sacrifices force them to face.
One of the exercises that’s most helpful for me as I’m preparing to write a novel is to imagine my characters’ particular and idiosyncratic tastes. Is someone the sort of person who likes playing with dogs, or do they prefer being utterly ignored by cats? Do they stay in on a Friday night, or wake up in a stranger’s bed on Saturday morning? Are they sane, rational, and empathetic, or did they vote for Donald Trump? Music, obviously, plays a huge role in this process; a woman who listens to nothing but Metallica cuts a different shape than a guy who blasts Verdi. For the characters in Let’s Not Do That Again, these differences bear out in stark, telling ways. Greta, for instance, is moody and aloof—the sort of person who alternates between old Juliette Gréco and Caroline Polachek as she smokes her roommate’s weed. Nancy, on the other hand, you’d expect to find humming along to big band standards as she skins a rabbit. And then there’s Nick, who when he isn’t saving his mother’s campaign or his sister’s life, is struggling to write a musical. It’s based on the early life of Joan Didion and it’s called Hello to All That! With this playlist, I’ve done my best to highlight not only the music that I imagine these folks would listen to, but also the music that inspired them, and let me get into their heads. It’s a chaotic and unruly mix—but then, so too are the Harrisons.
Je Ne Regrette Rien by Édith Piaf
After I finished writing the novel, I knew immediately that the chorus from Édith Piaf’s classic would serve as the book’s epigraph. The characters in Let’s Not Do That Again are ultimately faced with a difficult, morally ambiguous decision—the sort that I imagine many folks might end up regretting. Nancy, though, and her daughter, too, for that matter, are not those sorts of people. To that end, the defiance in Piaf’s voice as she proclaims to literally light the flame with her memories perfectly matches the characters’ ethos. They may have done bad things, but they did them for the right reasons: what is there to regret?
Taking Chances by Céline Dion
Early on in the novel, Nick tells his doctor that he broke down in tears after hearing “Taking Chances” in his local bodega. He describes how he was checking the ripeness of an avocado when the song came on and—bam—the floodgates opened. Full disclosure: this happened to me. Like Nick, I was weening myself off of Lexapro at the time; my serotonin levels were all over the place, and the smallest thing could—and often did—send me into an emotional tailspin. As I sobbed, I remember thinking how weird and sad and (mostly) hilarious the whole scene must have looked: here I was, holding an avocado, being moved to tears by a decade-old power ballad by Quebec’s reigning pop queen. Needless to say, I knew it had to be in the book.
Tiny Love by MIKA
On top of trying to straighten out his brain chemistry, Nick is also on a quest for love. Up until now he’s worked for his mother—a job that shuttled him back and forth between New York and DC and kept his calendar packed full of dreadful dinners with lobbyists. Now that he’s free, he’s eager to start living his own life, ideally with someone else. I’ve always loved MIKA—in my twenties, he was my go-to artist when I needed to pump myself up for a first date—and the lyrics in “Tiny Love” speak directly to the type of romance Nick is after. Despite writing musicals about Joan Didion, he’s a pragmatist at heart; he isn’t looking for “dramatic declarations in the rain,” but rather the kind of love that “gets better every day.”
I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) by Whitney Houston
Act I of the book closes with Nick and his date, Charlie, grabbing a nightcap at a gay dive bar in Chelsea. The date ends abruptly—to save his mother’s campaign, Nick is dispatched to Paris—but even so, this banger had to be included, mostly because I have never, not once in my life, been to a gay dive bar and not heard Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” To not put that song on this list would be to destroy any and all credibility I have as both a gay man and an author.
Door by Caroline Polachek
Disclaimer: I’m obsessed with Caroline Polachek. I listen to her non-stop and I imagine that Greta, who narrates Act II of the book, would too. “Door” in particular describes Greta’s state before she flees for Paris. She’s aimless and ambivalent, having rejected the comforts of her own family’s wealth to share an apartment with three other people in Bushwick. She works as a sales associate at an Apple store and feels—in Polachek’s words—like “just another girl in a sweater.”
J’ai Deux Amours by Madeleine Peyroux
All that said, at the depths of her melancholy, Greta stumbles upon a lifeline: an unnervingly handsome Frenchman named Xavier, who she meets gaming online. Their connection is intense and immediate, and before too long Xavier is inviting Greta to come see him in Paris. Enter: Madeleine Peyroux singing “J’ai Deux Amours.” Josephine Baker made the song famous, but there’s something about Peyroux’s voice that I’ve always found irresistible. I imagine Greta listening to the song as she considers Xavier’s invitation: she’s a New Yorker at heart, but now she has a second love, seducing her to the other side of the Atlantic.
Balance Ton Quoi by Angèle
As is too often the case with unnervingly handsome Frenchmen, Xavier is…well, let’s just say he’s not exactly the sort of person a mother like Nancy would want her daughter to end up with. Greta knows this—it’s what attracts her to Xavier in the first place—and she does her best to overlook the, uh, less-than-desirable-parts of his personality. Still, she’s smart, and incredibly observant; there’s a voice inside her screaming that Xavier means trouble. Belgian artist Angèle’s 2018 hit is an anthem for the #MeToo era in France. It calls out the misogyny that’s pervasive in French culture, and demands that women be treated with respect. It’s easy to picture Greta listening to it as she walks the streets of Paris, and struggling to ignore the song’s message: yes, she’s managed to piss her mother off, but at what cost?
9 to 5 by Dolly Parton
Every political campaign needs a song, the music that plays when the candidate awkwardly jogs up the stairs to the stage, and I can’t imagine a better one for Nancy—after all, she’s a workhorse, and with the election only weeks away, it’s hustlin’ time. What’s more, the song itself has a storied political history: Hillary used it in the 2008 primaries, and then Elizabeth Warren snatched it up in 2020. I admire both those women and the work they’ve done to make this country a better place, and I’d like to think that Nancy is following in their footsteps.
Wandering Lovers by Christine and the Queens
As Nancy’s campaign heats up, so does Nick’s relationship with Charlie. He’s returned from Paris with Greta in tow, and now he’s eager to take things to the next level romantically. I’m a huge fan of Christine and the Queens, and when I think of Nick and Charlie’s future, “Wandering Lovers” immediately springs to mind. The lyrics are simple but moving (in particular I love the line “with my fingers I will draw / The road where we need to go), and there’s a sense of hope baked into the melody. I feel for Nick—I want the best for him—and I’ll always root for him when I hear this song.
La Vie en Rose by Lucy Dacus
Everyone knows “La Vie en Rose”—you can’t sit through a meal at a mediocre French restaurant in Manhattan without hearing it at least once—but in her version of it, Lucy Dacus makes the classic all her own. There’s a driving beat to Dacus’ cover that creates a new, pulsing momentum—it’s still a love song, yes, but now there’s an edge. I listened to the tune basically on repeat as I wrote one of the book’s most crucial scenes, toward the end of the fourth act. In it, Greta is faced with desperate times, and so she takes desperate actions. The rose-colored glasses she’s been wearing are suddenly lifted, and she’s forced to save her own skin.
I’m Still Here by Elaine Paige
As an out-and-proud theater geek, lord knows I love a show tune. And this one is, without doubt, Nancy’s personal anthem! Like Carlotta Campion in Sondheim’s Follies, by the end of Let’s Not Do That Again, Nancy Harrison has been through it all: her husband’s tragic death, countless political campaigns, children throwing champagne bottles in Paris, the spiteful machinations of a disapproving mother-in-law, an unorthodox interaction with an industrial trash compactor… you name it, she’s seen it, and yet, here she is, running for the U.S. Senate. A number of incredible women have performed “I’m Still Here,” but lately I’ve been listening to Elaine Paige’s version, from the show’s 2011 Broadway revival. She’s got a full, determination to her voice, and a whole lot of moxie, too. And that’s just the sort of combination I think Nancy Harrison could get behind.
Grant Ginder is the author of five previous novels, including The People We Hate at the Wedding (which has been adapted into a major motion picture starring Allison Janney, Kristen Bell, and Ben Platt). Originally from Southern California, Ginder received his MFA from New York University, where he teaches writing.
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Shorties (Kaitlyn Greenidge's Recommended Books, A Profile of Soccer Mommy's Sophie Allison, and more)
Kaitlyn Greenidge recommended books at Book Marks.
Pitchfork profiled Soccer Mommy's Sophie Allison.
The A.V. Club reviewed the documentary a-ha: The Movie.
Dodie Bellamy talked grief with Public Books.
The Creative Independent interviewed multi-instrumentalist, dancer, and artist Alexandra Drewchin.
The Oxford American shared new fiction by Kirsten Arnett.
Bandcamp Daily delved into grindcore band Cloud Rat's discography.
Shondaland previewed April's best books.
Stream a new sing by Hovvdy.
Bustle and Book Riot recommended the week's best new books.
BrooklynVegan listed 2022's great albums (so far).
Electric Literature interviewed author Sara Nović.
Stream a new song by Florist.
The shortlist for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award has been announced.
Stream a new song by Priests’ Katie Alice Greer.
The New York Times previewed PEN's World Voices Festival.
Pinegrove covered Radiohead's "Let Down."
Jennifer Egan talked books and reading with ELLE.
Literary Hub interviewed Egan.
Stream a new Anna Calvi song.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn shared an excerpt from Otava Heikkilä’s “Letters for Lucardo: The Silent Lord”
Stream a new song by Tess Roby.
Esquire recommended books by queer writers.
Stream a new song by Horsegirl.
Aquarium Drunkard interviewed Destroyer's Dan Bejar.
Stream a new TOPS song.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
April 5, 2022
Candice Wuehle's Playlist for Her Novel "Monarch"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Candice Wuehle's novel Monarch is wholly original and brilliantly bizarre.
NPR Books wrote of the book:
"Candice Wuehle's irresistibly weird debut novel MONARCH is the kind of book that you want to start reading again immediately after turning the last page—not just to trace the conspiracy at its heart, but to appreciate how its kaleidoscope of beauty pageants, Y2K anxieties, famous dead girls, and deep state machinations synthesizes into an exploration of what makes up a self . . . Poetic, haunting."
In her own words, here is Candice Wuehle's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Monarch:
Monarch is a book about figuring out who you really are. This quest unfolds as a thriller—a sleepwalking teen’s investigation in to what she’s doing while sleepwalking leads to the discovery of a deep state government program. She finds out that everything she believed to be true about herself was programmed, incepted, baked-in to her personality before she ever had a chance to develop her own opinions. Radio in the ‘90s was my own personal (much less thrilling) journey to figure out who I was.
Unless you had a cool older sibling or skills with Napster, MTV and Top 40 pop stations were all encompassing back then. With the total assurance of a flat earther, I believed the world of music simply ended after whatever Carson Daly showed on Total Request Live. Like Monarch's main character, Jessica, I didn’t even know I didn’t like what I thought I liked. Then, in the summer of ’99, I met a girl from a distant high school at Shakespeare camp. She wore combat boots, made an excellent Shrew (in The Taming of), and wore so much black my dad referred to her as Johnny Cash. She burned me a CD of songs she’d recorded right off the college radio station—many of those songs listed here—and that was, for me, the beginning of becoming a new person. Or, maybe, not so much a “new” person as simply “a person.”
“Stranger Things Vol. 1” Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein
I wrote most of Monarch in a windowless basement office that I shared with other teaching assistants at a university in Kansas. On weekends and holidays, I was usually the only person in the entire building, an imposing concrete box totally out of tune with the rest of the campus. (Lots of campus humanities buildings were built in the sixties and thus erected to be riot proof. The University of Kansas feels doubly protected because it’s somewhat remote—so much so, in fact, that a portion of Andy Warhol’s collection was housed there during the cold war because his estate theorized this location was too far from a city of significance to be bombed.) It was in this building reminiscent of the anonymous institute Eleven escapes from in Stranger Things that I worked. I drowned out the silence with the soundtrack to Stranger Things, which is what I was thinking of every time something is described as “synthed up” in Monarch.
“Teenage FBI” by Guided by Voices
This song just so captures where The X Files-ish conspiracy vibe of Monarch meets sheer teen paranoia.
“Dreams” by The Cranberries
I guess I’m not the only writer this song imprinted on as the crystallization of whist and angst and beauty in the ‘90s. I feel like I see it mentioned all the time. Most recently, I watched the episode of Yellowjackets this song is used on the same day I read the scene in The Idiot by Elif Batuman where this plays on the jukebox in the Harvard bar. I think the very sound of this song captures the irreality of the era, the paradoxical sense of achieving an ideal that gets decimated by the very acts one has to perform to get there. I.e., obsession with dieting or the specifically ‘90s fear of being a “poser.” Like, the only thing worse than not getting what you dreamed or cared about was letting people know you cared enough to dream to begin with.
“Violet” by Hole
Monarch's main character, Jessica, has a riot grrrl babysitter who burns her a CD to take to college with her. Throughout the novel, Jessica treats it as a soundtrack for survival. The reader never finds out what’s on it, but I can tell you this song definitely is.
“Genie in a Bottle” by Christina Aguilera
As Christine, Jessica’s aforementioned babysitter, points out: genies are actual slaves. And yet—the year this song came out, my best friend and I rushed home from high school to make sure we didn't miss it on the TRL countdown. I very specifically remember my friend showing me how to do the “rub me the right way” dance move. I watched this music video so many times while writing Monarch and just sort of marveled that there was a time not very long ago when teens who had been Disney child stars the week before performed choreographed sex acts in the middle of the afternoon on MTV.
“Barbie Girl” by Aqua
I owned this album and listened to this song unironically in junior high. The note on the back of the CD case, "The song 'Barbie Girl' is a social comment and was not created or approved by the makers of the doll," was utterly lost on me and every other teen I knew. It feels perfectly late ‘90s America to be so certain of the era’s patriarchal values as to totally miss the point of a Danish pop song that satirizes treating women like objects.
“Natural’s Not In It” by Gang of Four
“The body is good business/ sell out, maintain the interest” is a line that could be the dialogue of any of Monarch's villains.
“Pretty Girls Make Graves” by The Smiths
At one point in Monarch, Jessica replaces the Christina Aguilera CD the sleeping teen girl sitting next to her on flight is playing with The Smiths. Specifically, she sets it to “Pretty Girls Make Graves” so the song loops on repeat to try to reverse program the cultural messaging coming from the pop music the girl usually listens to. Of course, there’s the additional layer that this is a song about a closeted gay man whose girlfriend is pressuring him to have sex with her. So much of Monarch is about suppressed desire and the longing that comes from believing “I could have been wild and I could have been free/ But nature played this trick on me.”
“Ask” by The Smiths
I grew up in a town with a bar built from a boxcar rumored to have been bought for one dollar. It’s where everyone went all summer long after we graduated and it was the only place with a jukebox and (if you steered clear of pool cues) the only place we danced other than people’s kitchens. Mostly, I remember dancing to this song. I love the wild swing it takes from cheesy fake waves and seagull sounds to the jaunty verses to the slow motion shift from shyness to the A-bomb to what is my favorite line of any song, ever: “Nature is a language/ can’t you read?” Like “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” this is a song about desire and the ways we try and fail to stifle it, about the undeniable self-realizations that can only be discovered for some people through a yearning that dissolves cultural conditioning or societal expectations or even internalized beliefs.
“Love Shack” by The B-52s
While I was working on Monarch, my partner was finishing up a memoir that is in part about being raised in an ultra religious household. While a lot of his story is really dark, his memories of being taught censored pop songs in church youth group are hilarious. I transplanted some of that onto a scene in Monarch where Jessica and her secret girlfriend, Veronica, revise the words of this song to “Love Shack, a little place where we can get with Jesus” as a way to tease Veronica’s extremely Catholic mother.
“Riders on the Storm” by The Doors
Well, there’s a character in the book that I wanted to be really stereotypically masculine and this just felt to me like the song he plays on repeat. A significant portion of the action of one chapter involves skipping back to this track on the CD of L.A. Woman.
“Everybody (Backstreets Back)” by The Backstreet Boys
The Backstreet Boys was the first concert I begged my parents to let me go to. Mandy Moore opened and it was awesome. This song cracks me up now because it is, ostensibly, a song about a triumphant comeback (hilariously, I can remember AJ singing “Oh my god, were back again” with what seemed like genuine shock to be “back again”) but this comeback is on…a debut album. It also feels symptomatic of a larger cultural obsession with being not just The Best, but The Best Of All Time. There’s a point in Monarch when Jessica finds out she has some dormant super skills and it’s mentioned that a Backstreet Boys song is playing from a boom box—this is that Backstreet Boys song.
“Atrocity Exhibition” by Joy Division
All of Joy Division’s music is like an invitation to another world—a confirmation of a suspicion I’ve had since I was a kid listening at the top of the steps to whatever my parents did after I was supposed to go to sleep that there’s another, truer, layer underneath the surface. For this reason, one of the most emotionally important scenes of Monarch centers around listening to Joy Division. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Silently, Christine put the disc in my boom box. We sat next to each other on my bedroom floor, our backs against my bed, and listened. Sometimes, I thought it sounded like the instruments were committing suicide and sometimes I thought it sounded like they were deciding to live. Some of them shrieked and burned but there was always at least one sound like a heartbeat underlying it all; discordant and efficient as a mob. The lead singer’s voice was flat, his mouth so close to the microphone and then suddenly so far away.
This is the way, step inside, he repeated again and again. A broadcast from a radio at the bottom of the ocean.
“Say Yes” by Elliott Smith
“Crooked spin can’t come to rest/ I’m damaged bad at best.”
There’s a chapter of Monarch that begins “I became a perv for oblivion after that” that my partner said made him think of this line. Elliott Smith is certainly the emotional undertrack of the nineties for me. Like Smith was, Monarch is obsessed with the tension between the desire to be seen and the desire to disappear. It's a book propelled by Jessica’s suspicion that she’s too damaged to ever rest, to do anything but the work of trying to forget.
“2:45 AM” by Elliott Smith
“Going out sleepwalking/ where mute memories start talking.”
I could quote almost every line from “2:45 AM” in reference to Monarch. In fact, I think it’s possible the plot of the book—which involves sleepwalking, resurfaced memories, and trying to “split back in two”—could have been incepted in me by this song.
Candice Wuehle is the author of the poetry collections Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed, BOUND, and Death Industrial Complex, shortlisted for the Believer Book Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she holds a PhD in literary studies and creative writing from the University of Kansas.
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Rebecca Scherm's Playlist for Her Novel "A House Between Earth and the Moon"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Rebecca Scherm's novel A House Between Earth and the Moon blends science fiction and climate fiction to brilliant effect.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"A high-concept domestic novel that merges science fiction and eco-fiction tropes. . . . Scherm [gives] the climate change novel a wider yet still realistic scope and . . . nuanced characters in Alex and Mary Agnes, who are both eager to do the right thing but undone by humanity, its fickle nature, and its allegedly liberating but often self-imprisoning technologies. . . . An ambitious . . . dystopian tale."
In her own words, here is Rebecca Scherm's Book Notes music playlist for her novel A House Between Earth and the Moon:
With this book, especially, I asked the music I listened to while writing to help me inhabit the world of the book and then later, to help me cope with the world I’d created. The first five years of music was a desperate buffet, but the last two years feel right, bound up tight with the atmosphere. Often, I credit the music itself for opening the world that I’m writing, leading me further into an atmosphere or an emotion—or, in this case, a space station that’s shaped like a wheel, a loop that’s shut tight, where some rooms look like Ikea As-Is departments and some rooms like caverns carved from hard candy.
1. Perfume Genius, “Slip Away,” from No Shape
When I hear No Shape now, I feel a rush of gratitude that can get a little heavy and emotional for everyday life. This book was a beast, and from 2016-17 I was pretty lost. I was already past my deadline but nowhere close to finished, and the world I was writing kept expanding out-out-out but it wouldn’t go forward. I’d had a rough miscarriage, a sudden change in editors, and I was living in a place that gave me a bad teenage feeling of being simultaneously bored and unsuccessful and wrong in my surroundings. Then came No Shape. It’s tempting to make this a tidy story, and I know it wasn’t, but I do know that soaking myself in this album opened up a door that I couldn’t find before. The hugeness of the sound and the tightness of his aesthetic, how it’s lush and cool at the same time—it gave me a clue about how Mary Agnes might be on Parallaxis, and that was the beginning of, you know, getting a grip.
2. The Aluminum Group, “Impress Me”
This song was on a treasured mix CD given to me in high school; I’ve loved it for close to twenty years. I resist lyrics generally—I’d rather not understand the words, if there are words—but I’ve been listening this song too long to have missed them. You know how some people say that something’s “impressive” in a way that makes clear how difficult they believe they are to impress? That’s the set up for this song, which still makes me laugh even though I’ve heard it a thousand times. Anyway, here this song is about Tess and Katherine, trying to keep their egos inflated while they negotiate.
3. Tierra Whack, “Pretty Ugly”
This one’s for Magnes—or any teenager, really. Tierra Whack is incomparable, an artist like no other, and yet this song is familiar to me in that it makes me feel fifteen again, frantically toggling between self-loathing and grandeur, trying to perform something acceptable between them.
4. Amo Amo, “Closer to You”
5. Esme Patterson, “Light in your Window”
There were a few drafts of this book narrated entirely by Tess, and when pressed to define the reality of the narratives she gave us about all the other characters, I would ask my frustrated reader why that was so important. In one draft, I killed her off at the 2/3 mark to get around her point of view. Eventually, I found another way. I like pairing these two songs as a Tess arc—her smugness and ecstasy when she gets closer and closer to her subjects; her desperation when her limits and her overreach simultaneously become clear.
6. “Time Will Tell,” Blood Orange
Meg and Alex’s story is messy, and that it stays messy and unresolved will probably be frustrating to some people. Sorry! Theirs is a long marriage, before and after the book. Nothing stays resolved! Two people who want to work it out are going to try, and keep trying, and see what happens. Should they have split up? They didn’t want to. Is that enough?
7. Phillip Glass: Piano Works, Phillip Glass performed by Jenny Lin, and The Orphee Suite performed by Paul Barnes
For the last few months before I turned in the final revision, there was only Philip Glass piano music. Putting it on each day in my headphones was like putting on blinkers. I loved it, and I hated it, and I couldn’t go without it. This relentlessly precise music makes my pulse race and also makes me a little nuts. I haven’t listened to it since I turned the book in. I need some time apart.
8. 100 Gecs, “Money Machine”
For the couple of years, this song has played a pretty crucial role in hanging onto my mental health. When I get a big surge of adrenaline in my work life—like if I just banged out first draft of a scene that was really hard to write, or I got a rejection or an acceptance (or both at the same time!), and everything feels a little too hot in a way that could turn bad if not immediately managed, I listen to this song, usually twice, followed by some New Age choral music to come back down. A pretty good recipe.
Rebecca Scherm is the author of Unbecoming. She lives in California with her family.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
Shorties (Two Interviews with Ocean Vuong, New Music from Deer Scout, and more)
Morning Edition and TIME interviewed poet Ocean Vuong.
Stream a new song by Deer Scout.
The Oxford American interviewed musician Moses Sumney.
Read a new short story by Esmé Weijun Wang.
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Fences covered the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil."
Electric Literature shared two poems by Daniel Garcia.
Bandcamp Daily recapped winter's best albums.
Kirkus interviewed author Alex Segura.
Stream a new song by POLIÇA.
Neema Avashia recommended books that show a different side of Appalachia at Electric Literature.
Stream a new song by Nina Nastasia.
The Creative Independent interviewed author Tanais.
Stream a new Wet Leg song.
Debutiful recommended April's best debut books.
School Library Journal recommended notable children's novels in poetry and verse.
Stream a new song by Teenage Fanclub.
Slate shared new fiction by Matt Bell.
Said Ag Ayad of Tinariwen shared a mixtape of influences at Aquarium Drunkard.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn previewed April's most anticipated books.
The Guardian interviewed author David Peace.
Kevin Barry talked to the New Yorker about his story in this week's issue.
Rain Taxi interviewed author Lance Olsen.
Torrey Peters shared her morning routine with the New York Times.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
April 4, 2022
Jean Chen Ho's Playlist for Her Novel "Fiona and Jane"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Jean Chen Ho's Fiona and Jane is a striking novel about friendship, an auspicious debut.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"Intimate, cinematic. . . . The world Ho creates between the two women feels like one friend reading the other’s story, wishing she were there"
In her own words, here is Jean Chen Ho's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Fiona and Jane:
My “playlist” for The Largehearted Boy is actually an album that I’ve listened to many, many times, from beginning to end without skipping a single track. Mos Def’s 1999 solo debut, Black on Both Sides, is not unlike a favorite novel I return to every so often, discovering something new and precious each time.
I listened to Black on Both Sides on repeat the summer I had an internship with a Hollywood producer. My commute was a little over an hour long, from the suburbs in the southeast corner of LA County to the hills that overlooked the Pacific Ocean in the west. I’d be able to finish the entire album on the drive, volume on max. Mos Def’s voice pumped out of my Toyota Camry speakers, while I maneuvered through traffic across five highways (the 91, 605, 5, 10, 405).
I got the job through a diversity program at my college career center. Monday through Friday, I drove from my parents’ house in Cerritos to the producer’s mansion in Brentwood. I did script coverage and faxed things for her and took inventory of the gifts she received on her birthday, etc. One weekend I helped her with a special project, moving a dozen banker’s boxes from her home office to a storage facility, and she paid me an extra hundred bucks for it on top of my biweekly stipend.
I didn’t hate the job; I didn’t exactly enjoy it, either. It was slightly better than working at Foot Action, which was what I did for money the summer before. Working for that Hollywood producer, I was hoping to learn something in those months. About myself, or about what possibilities existed for me, in the future.
Black on Both Sides remains one of the finest examples of art, in my mind, that merges aesthetic excellence with an irrevocably political point of view. The album fuses sonic beauty and prodigious lyricism with anti-capitalist ideology and radical self-love. From the stories of his growing up in Brooklyn to a discussion of global, diasporic, and historically rooted Blackness, Mos Def’s music was where I learned something that summer. “Mind over matter, soul before flesh / Angels hold a pen, keep a record in time…”
In the fall, I went back up to Berkeley and carried on with school. I submitted a report to the career center for their diversity initiative.
Some years later, I saw Mos Def perform at the Fillmore in SF. The man had charisma just dripping off him. This was some time in the 2000s, after I’d graduated college with a degree in English. In those years, I didn’t yet know how to say: I want to write fiction. It would be years before I could claim that desire, and feel brave enough to sign up for my first writing class. And longer, still, to learn how to make something artful, beautiful, and political all at once. I’m still learning, of course, how to do that. I listen to Black on Both Sides every so often to remind me of what’s possible.
Jean Chen Ho is a doctoral candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Fellow in fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her writing has been published in The Georgia Review, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Guernica, The Rumpus, Apogee, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and others. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Southern California, and lives in Los Angeles.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
Ian MacAllen's Playlist for His Book "Red Sauce"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Ian MacAllen's Red Sauce is a smart and compelling examination of Italian food's journey from humble immigrant food to rItalian-American cuisine.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"MacAllen contends that Italian-American food, once spurned as a garlic-ridden, irredeemably ethnic cuisine, has become so much a part of U.S. palates that it is now, quite simply, American cooking.... Sharing his vast knowledge of history, ingredients, and technique, MacAllen offers an in-depth history of the Italian contribution to America’s culinary landscape."
In his own words, here is Ian MacAllen's Book Notes music playlist for his book Red Sauce:
Red Sauce began as a question. My wife and I were eating dinner at Trattoria Spaghetto in the West Village drinking too much wine – the restaurant sold wine by the carafe. It was one of those classic red sauce joints with red checkered tablecloths and a big spread of antipasti in the center of the room. A giant slab of veal parmigiana sat on my plate. I started to wonder: who invented this perfect dish?
Later that night, I poked around on the internet looking for answers. My search turned up a few unsatisfactory Wikipedia entries. I wanted to know more. I looked deeper, visiting the main branch of the New York Public library to access their digital databases. I bought a few books at the Strand. Before realizing what I was doing, I was researching a book.
Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American traces the origins of dishes most commonly associated with Italian-American food, especially during the middle of the twentieth century. Inspired by the foods Italian immigrants brought with them and imitating the dishes they believed wealthy Italians had eaten back at home, these new Americans created an entirely unique cuisine linked to the old world but made possible only in the new. From early living room restaurants up to the modern national chain, I sought out the myths and legends and discerned the truth from the fiction.
Taylor Swift: Welcome To New York
How does a southern country singer turned mega pop star relate to a book about Italian-American food? The story of red sauce cuisine is the story of immigrants coming to the United States seeking a better life. Not a small number of Italian immigrants passed through New York City while on this journey. Many settled right here for the very same reason Taylor wrote this song. The first line, "Walkin' through a crowd, the village is aglow," is especially apropos since it is the neighborhood where many early Italian immigrants settled. Taylor Swift has written an anthem celebrating the power of New York City as a place for new beginnings, and it's the perfect accompaniment to a book written about a cuisine invented in this city for the very same reason.
Lou Monte: Dominick the Donkey
This Christmas song tells the story of Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey who delivers toys manufactured in Brooklyn to the little boys and girls of Italy. Supposedly, when it was first recorded in 1960, the production of the song was backed by the Gambino crime family. Back then it was seen as a novelty, but has since become a cult classic. For me, it is the quintessential Italian-American Christmas tradition. However, I recently learned the song primarily is known by Italian-Americans from New Jersey where Lou Monte lived. I was at McNally Jackson's stationary store, Goods For the Study, buying a donkey Christmas tree ornament and decided to test the theory. I asked the cashier, who was originally from the midwest, if she had ever heard of Dominick. She had not.
The Weeknd: Blinding Lights
I spent much of the last two years at my parents house on Cape Cod, but still commuting to New York City a few times a month. Every single time I made the four to five hour drive, Blinding Lights played at least once, and sometimes two or three times. It became kind of addictive, and an especially good mood lifter as I rounded the curve from I-95 to I-195 in Providence, Rhode Island–about four hours into the journey from New York. Those long, solitary car rides actually proved the perfect place to think about the Red Sauce manuscript. There wasn't much else to do, since I usually made those drives alone. I had received a number of rejections on the first draft of the manuscript, and spent those long car rides thinking about how to make improvements to it. Blinding Lights is catchy, but also melodic enough to fade into the background. That makes it perfect for drowning out the voices of other people working from home in a shared space. Even with the book contract signed, I still had final edits to make. Blinding Light, and indeed the whole After Hours album served as the background music while I did a final edit. By then it was drowning out not just the sound of Zoom calls, but the crying of a newborn baby.
Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP: We Speak No Americano
This upbeat dance mix samples from Renato Carosone's 1956 "Tu Vuò Fa' L'Americano." The original song tells the story of Italians acting like Americans – drinking whiskey and dancing to rock and roll – in the post war period. Yolanda Be Cool's take is a great way to recharge after a long period of editing or researching. I just want to get up and dance, which I am very bad at.
Dean Martin: That's Amore
In an early draft of Red Sauce, I started each chapter with a relevant quote. Obviously, "when the moon hits your eye," offered the perfect opportunity to frame the chapter on pizza. But then you come to the part where you can try to do rights requests – or you can just cut the quote. Given the limited time and lack of budget, it was easier to drop the quotes.
Alabama 3: Woke Up This Morning a.k.a The Sopranos' Theme Song
Yes, I know it seems obvious that a book about Italian-American food would point to the theme song of the most famous celebration of Italian-American culture since the invention of the frozen pizza. But hear me out. First, the whole process of researching, writing, querying, and submitting a manuscript has a whole lot of ups and downs – a lot more downs than ups. And there not many songs do as a good a job of reinforcing a kind of "fuck you" attitude that you need to get that done. As a theme song, it plays over the opening credits of The Sopranos TV show. The accompanying b-roll highlights various points across north Jersey. Some of those sites have since been torn down. The show ran from 1999 to 2007, corresponding with the time I graduated from high school through attending Rutgers and moving to Jersey City. Tony's drive from the Lincoln Tunnel to suburban north Jersey by way the turnpike follows the same path I take home.
Frank Sinatra: My Way
Did you really think a musical companion list to a book about Italian-American cuisine was going to get by without Frank Sinatra making an appearance? Honestly, this whole list could be Frank. If you were my father-in-law, it might be. There are a lot of great Sinatra songs that could fit on this list. New York, New York would fit at home perfectly here for the same reason Taylor Swift's anthem kicked off this playlist: Sinatra was celebrating the power of moving to the city. But since this isn't the final inning at Yankee Stadium, nor is it the last song at a Westmount Country Club wedding, I thought I'd skip it. Instead, My Way is a song about accomplishment, regret, mistakes, ups, downs, and ultimately perseverance. Metaphorically, it is the same journey the Italian immigrants who invented red sauce cuisine experienced. And if there is a better analogy for completing a book, I don't know it.
Ian MacAllen is a writer and book critic. He has written reviews and interviews for Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, The Rumpus, Trampset, Electric Literature, and Fiction Advocate, with other nonfiction in The Billfold, Thought Catalog, and io9. His short fiction has appeared in The Offing, 45th Parallel Magazine, Little Fiction, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Joyland Magazine, and elsewhere. His maternal grandfather was born in Bagnoli del Trigno in Molise, Italy and his maternal grandmother's family was from Naples and Sicily. He is descended from a line of Sicilian Strega. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
Shorties (Jennifer Egan on Her New Novel, A Conversation Between Michelle Zauner and Jeff Tweedy, and more)
The Los Angeles Times profiled author Jennifer Egan.
Interview magazine shared a conversation between Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner and Jeff Tweedy.
The Current interviewed Band of Horses frontman Ben Bridwell.
Bitch Media previewed April's best books for feminists.
Cover Me recapped March's best cover songs.
John Warner talked teaching writing with Public Books.
Bitch Media listed February's best feminist albums.
Mariko Tamaki talked comics and her new publishing imprint with NPR Books.
Paste previewed April's best albums.
Min Jin Lee discussed her writing and wardrobe with The Cut.
The Creative Independent interviewed musician Mikey Coltun.
Electric Literature recommended books set in the spring.
PopMatters profiled singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche.
Shondaland recommended trans and nonbinary writers to read.
Electric Literature interviewed author Ayanna Lloyd Banwo.
The Guardian interviewed the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle.
Shondaland interviewed author Maud Newton.
Kevin Morby covered the Replacements' "Swingin Party."
Debutiful interviewed author Caleb Tankersley.
Stream a new song by Radiohead side project the Smile.
Tor Nightfire recommended April's best horror books.
BrooklynVegan recommended the week's best new albums.
Bookworm interviewed poet Paul Tran.
Screaming Females covered the Selector's "On My Radio."
Tallahassee Democrat profiled author Donald Ray Pollock.
Sondre Lerche shared the influences behind his new album at BrooklynVegan.
Brian James Gage recommended contemporary horror novels that push boundaries at Electric Literature.
Stream a new song by Toro y Moi.
The Guardian profiled poet Ocean Vuong.
The Quietus recapped March's best albums and songs.
Electric Literature shared new fiction by Marcia Walker.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
April 3, 2022
April's Best eBook Deals
eBooks on sale for $1.99 this month:
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998
Country Music Hair by Erin Duvall
Faitheist by Chris Stedman
Family Pictures by Sue Miller
Fear Itself by Walter Mosley
For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange
I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This! by Bob Newhart
Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
Last Words by George Carlin
Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
Making It by Norman Podhoretz
Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel
A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie
Seeds of Hope by Jane Goodall
This 'n That by Bette Davis
The Unexpected Guest by Agatha Christie
The Unreal and the Real by Ursula K. Le Guin
Waylon by Waylon Jennings
Yes, I Can Say That by Judy Gold
eBooks on sale for $2.99 this month:
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The Dharma of The Princess Bride by Ethan Nichtern
Do You Feel Like I Do? by Peter Frampton
Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies by Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz
I Might Regret This by Abbi Jacobson
Keep Moving by Dick Van Dyke
Kiss Me Like A Stranger by Gene Wilder
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Reason for Hope by Jane Goodall
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
eBooks on sale for $3.99 this month:
Brave Companions by David McCullough
Clemente by David Maraniss
Home Work by Julie Andrews
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
Michael Jordan by Roland Lazenby
eBooks on sale for $4.99 this month:
The Andy Warhol Diaries
Coach Wooden and Me by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo
The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
April 1, 2022
Mary Kuryla's Playlist for Her Novel "Away to Stay"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Mary Kuryla's novel Away to Stay is a stunning coming-of-age story.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Family proves both an elusive dream and disquieting reality in Kuryla’s delightfully quirky debut...Kuryla shines in her descriptions of the offbeat characters and their antics…It adds up to a captivating coming-of-age yarn."
In her own words, here is Mary Kuryla's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Away to Stay:
Olya, the young narrator in my novel Away to Stay, longs for a home after years of an itinerant life with her Russian émigré mother, Irina. Olya is not alone in her longing. Irina longs to dance in an American ballet company. Irina’s cousin Jack, whose house Olya will shelter in following a harrowing incident while sleeping in her mother’s car, longs to make the dog he kidnapped from the Riverside Police Department stop running away. Dog and man are in a battle of wills brought on by their trauma serving in Afghanistan war. But this battle has a precedent. What Jack most wants is to stop Irina from running off on him. Unbeknownst to Olya, this is the stage that is set with her crossing the threshold into Jack’s home. Everyone in this domestic drama wants what they cannot have, and in those brief moments when they do get a tenuous hold on their dream, they grasp too tightly.
“Rain Dogs” by Tom Waits
According to the Tom Waits’ song, if you’re a rain dog, “You’ll never be going back home.” Olya’s begrudging identification with the dog named Bird in the novel reflects this possibility, as well as her terror that she will never find a home in the first place and, if she does, she won’t be able to stay in it. Could Olya have gotten so used to an itinerant life with her mother that she’s no longer capable of staying anywhere long? The lines “Huddle a doorway with the Rain Dogs/For I am a Rain Dog too” sum up Olya’s ambivalence, her longing to get past the doorway, but also her pride in staying on the outside, being a rain dog, someone who can survive in doorways. Sure, there may not be a home for her, but at least no one can take away a doorway. Toward this end, the book starts in media res, with Olya literally on the doorstep of a house that she wants in. It’s 3 o’clock in the morning, and she is mustering the courage to knock when the door opens, and a dog leaps straight through the screen door. Olya gets blamed for letting the dog out, putting her in head-to-head conflict with the house’s owner, Jack. Is this the cost of living with others in a house, she wonders. Is it worth it? A rain dog is a dog caught in the rain, with its whole trail washed away by the water so he can't get back home. Those are also the stakes of Away to Stay: will the twelve-year-old Olya establish firm enough footing in a home, prove she can stay and, through her resilience and resolve, inspire Jack and Irina to change their ways and make a home for her—or is she too doomed to wander, the trail home forever washed away? Away to Stay looks at what it takes to leave a trail that can’t be washed away.
“Delia’s Gone” by Johnny Cash
After a catastrophe has struck Riverside, California, Olya is desperate to get back to Jack’s house. Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone” plays on the car radio her friend McFate drives. “Delia all my life/If I hadn’t shot poor Delia/I’d of had her for my wife”, which pretty much sums up the relationship between Jack and Irina, Olya’s mother, who suffer profound morbid ambivalence for each other. Each one as likely to make love to the other as kill the other. More damaging still, their obsession operates to the exclusion of all others. When we meet Jack, he has transferred some of that obsession for Irina onto the dog, but in Bird’s case it appears that if he can’t make the dog stay, he will make the dog dead, as evidenced in his manic firing of a gun at the floor to dislodge Bird from hiding under his house. “If your woman’s devilish, you can let her run or you/or you can bring her down and do her like Delia got done.” As outrageous and grievous as Cash’s lyrics were, the singer/songwriter had a flawless ear for humans’ naked ambivalence for each other and the incorrigible language it could shape in a man’s mouth. The song foreshadows the violence that caps off the novel’s conclusion.
“U.R.A. Fever” by The Kills
The velocity of Jack’s feeling for Olya’s mother Irina and his obsession with training his dog is brilliantly expressed in these lines, “Go ahead and have her, go ahead and leave her/You only ever had her when you were a fever” from “U.R.A. Fever” by The Kills. Jack and Irina come and go in each other’s lives, but when they do unite, their union is bigger than they are, feverish, bordering on illness, rendering them helpless. The mechanical pulse of “U.R.A Fever,”the drone and the push/pull of the arrangement captures the emotional rhythm of Jack and Irina’s love/hate. But they are not alone in their extremity. The narrator Olya is in her own fever to live in a house. “I am a fever/I am a fever/I ain’t born typical.” The Kills’ song seems to be sung by the fever itself, as suggested by the first-person lyrics. The narrator of the novel, Olya, feels she too is not born into the world typically; she does not even inhabit a house that would confer a modicum of security and predictability. Additionally, the song’s mix often devolves into audio static; it’s sort of decom posing, like a fever breaking down the body’s defenses. Olya’s language, the way she perceives and describes the world around her reflects this atypicality. Olya finds tentative shelter in Jack’s house. How could Jack and Olya possibly have guessed that coming to know each other and care for each other would prove the cooling of their fever.
“Merci Bon Dieu,” written by Frantz Casseus, sung by Harry Belafonte
There is a moving scene in the Claire Denis film 35 Shots of Rum when the central protagonists, a father and his college-age daughter, go about their evening routine of preparing dinner, showering and doing laundry. The daughter puts Harry Belafonte’s rendition of “Merci Bon Dieu” on a player. Belafonte’s gorgeous rendition is perfect accompaniment to this duo’s perfect relationship. In fact, the harmony and contentment in their relationship is a gift, a gift from God, as the song suggests. It’s no surprise that the arc of the story concerns the necessary decentering of their relationship to make room for others, including a romantic partner for each. Jack and Olya’s relationship in Away to Stay is at the opposite pole to Denis’s portrayal of a loving father/daughter dyad. Jack and Olya are in a battle over the house, the dog, even Olya’s mother. Nothing in their relationship would appear to be a gift of God’s grace. Ironically, the fatherless Olya’s devotion to the Gideon’s Bible she stole from a motel inspires her to make a request of God, who she wildly imagines has manifested through a crack in the basement of Jack’s house. God informs her that she will be tested in her desire to stay, and that test means dealing with Jack. Though forged in opposition, Olya and Jack eventually develop a powerful bond. The uplifting spiritual quality of Belafonte’s “Merci Bon Dieu” captures the often overlooked, but just as often ecstatic pleasures of a happy routine with others in a home. Olya too comes to know some of the simple pleasures of domestic routines in cleaning Jack’s house and with each dinner Jack prepares for her.
“The Swan Theme” from Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky
Olya’s mother Irina would have trained tirelessly at the Vaganova School of Ballet to dance Swan Lake and may have danced the part of Odette, the Swan Queen, at the Kirov before emigrating from Russia. In Away to Stay Irina knows the story so well she seems to dance it daily in life. The story of doomed love—the princess Odette is cursed to only take human form at midnight, thwarting the prince’s pursuit with the dawn—could describe the elision of the dog, aptly named Bird, and the woman Irina in Jack’s mind. When Olya meets Jack, he has managed to compartmentalize his obsession with Irina by turning it upon the dog he trains to stay. But at night, he returns to his obsession with Irina, as if the dog assumes human form once again. Indeed, the reason the couple’s romantic trysts are so well-hidden from Olya is because they occur under the cloak of night, often coinciding with her mother’s literal flight from her life. Tchaikovsky’s classic composition begins quietly, with great delicacy, mirroring the waking of the swans on the lake. but ends in a clamor. This range of sound could also describe the range of feeling that occurs quick as mercury between the couple. The progress of the novel moves as well from a quiet start in the middle of the night into a crescendo at the conclusion.
Youth of America by the Wipers
Away to Stay takes place in 2006, Riverside, CA. The long clang of grunge rock would have been fading in those years though the champions of shitty clothes and shittier attitudes reflected in bands like Nirvana would still register in the lives of some youths. As if steeling itself against a glossy tech future of Instagram lips and vocals swallowed in autotuning, The Wipes’ garage album Youth of America records registers of ragtag and rain dogs and guitar meanders of the unhoused and runaway teen. “Say a prayer for the youth of America/God Bless the youth of America/and I can’t stand this anymore/all the dead kids lying on your door.” Olya is probably not cool enough to have heard of the band, but her odd and unlikely high school dropout friend McFate probably is, and he surely recognizes in her this very possible fate of a dead kid lying in someone’s door. In Away to Stay, McFate talks I”n a mostly vile manner, if with the rhetorical flourish of a preacher. He is devoted to Bukowski and scribbles lines from the writer’s poems on toilet stalls. He does it to hear some music and tragedy in the dumb walls that are his job as school janitor to clean up. Olya and McFate are twinned souls in their ability to find grace in the least likely of places, including a house laid flat in an earthquake. They are the orphans of the grunge era. McFate might be just as likely to quote Barry Hannah in praise of Olya, “Your heart a searching dog in the rubble,” and he would be right.
“I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges
Because “And now I wanna be your dog” is one of the greatest lines in a song ever written and recorded, and don’t we all wanna be someone’s dog, if only they knew how to be masters? In Away to Stay, the dog named Bird shows Olya something of what it is to trust, and through this training, Olya is able to reveal to Jack the absence of trust between him and his dog, which in turn avails of Jack a remedy for all that ails all of them.
Mary Kuryla's collection Freak Weather: Stories won the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was published by University of Massachusetts Press. Her stories have received The Pushcart Prize and the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Prize and appeared in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Agni, Epoch, and elsewhere.
Her award-winning shorts and feature films have premiered at Sundance and Toronto. She has written screen adaptations for studios and independents. Kuryla is a screenwriting professor in the School of Film and TV at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
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March 31, 2022
Elaine Hsieh Chou's Playlist for Her Novel "Disorientation"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Elaine Hsieh Chou's Disorientation is an innovative campus novel, funny and incisive, and one of the best books of the year.
Shelf Awareness wrote of the book:
"Gleefully dark and incisive . . . Chou's examination of the catch-22s faced by Asian Americans, particularly women, straddles the line between satiric and searing . . . Disorientation is the best combination of entertaining and thought-provoking, and Chou is an exciting new voice in novel-length fiction."
In her own words, here is Elaine Hsieh Chou's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Disorientation:
As someone who works in silence, music didn’t have a major impact on the drafting of Disorientation. It was only when I visualized the whole story, when it came together as one moving picture, that accompanying songs came to me as if I were setting the soundtrack to the film version of the novel.
Here are twelve tracks for twelve scenes in Disorientation. I loved gathering these songs by singers from different eras and countries, from Filipino-British rock goddesses to Taiwanese megastars and the coolest rapper in Vietnam. I hope the soundtrack can act as the perfect compliment to the experience of reading the novel.
Note that some descriptions contain spoilers!
1. Panic at the Archive
Mitski - “Nobody”
When we first meet Ingrid Yang, she’s so anxious, she prays for stomach ulcers so she’ll have an excuse for failing her dissertation. “Nobody” by Mitski brims with anxiety and yet (or maybe because of that), it’s so catchy you can't unstick it from your head. Even the repetition of “nobody” starts to feel manic and as the chorus slows down at the song’s close, the anxiety grows more palpable than ever. Ingrid understands, “No one can save me.”
2. Oh that Vivian Vo!
Beabadoobee - “She Plays Bass”
Vivian Vo is everything Ingrid isn’t: stylish to her dowdy, clued-in to her clueless, confident to her insecure. Ingrid swears she hates her but… does she really just want to be her? Here’s an anthem for the most iconic activist at Barnes University (and if Vivian were in a band, she would totally play bass).
3. There’s Something About Alex…
Danny Chan - “Puppy Love”
With his sleeve of tattoos and diamond stud earring, Alex Kim is not Ingrid’s type… So why does she melt into a nervous puddle around him? This sugar-sweet Cantonese song featured in the Hong Kongese film Puppy Love (1985) is what I imagine dancing through Ingrid’s head when she first lays eyes on Alex.
4. Down for Whatever
Suboi - “N-SAO?”
One of my favorite scenes from Office Space is when the gang hacks their company’s computer system to Ice Cube’s “Down for Whatever.” What would otherwise be an uninspiring scene (typing followed by more typing) suddenly feels high-stakes and slick. Taking inspiration from this, when Ingrid and her friend Eunice Kim break into the Xiao-Wen Chou archive, Suboi’s fearless “N-SAO?” plays. Tampons will be involved.
5. Supersleuths with Snacks (Ode to Eunice)
Ginger Root - “Juban District”
Ingrid and Eunice start staking out someone’s house and eating all manner of junk food to pass the time (they’re hardly inconspicuous since Eunice insists they wear black sunglasses and berets). Ginger Root’s “Juban District'' perfectly evokes the two friends’ comical supersleuthing antics; I can just picture them popping up their heads from behind bushes. The song’s effervescent melody also reminds me of Eunice, the kind of friend who can always tease a smile out of Ingrid. PS: Watch the music video–it’s delightful.
6. Not So Fast & Furious
Giriboy - “Souljalee”
After a contentious open forum, Ingrid passes out from taking too many OTC allergy pills that cause hallucinations. Alex wakes her up and drives her home. Because he only blasts rap in his bedroom, Ingrid is caught off guard when he puts on an earnest ballad in Korean, Giriboy’s sunnily addictive “Souljalee.” Alex keeps on surprising Ingrid–she realizes she shouldn’t have judged a song by its cover art.
7. It’s So Bad, I Can’t Look Away
Koo Mei - “Love Without End
When Chinatown Blues, an offensive play by Xiao-Wen Chou, is performed at the university, Ingrid finds herself unable to look away from the horrorshow on display. Images of the play mix with real-life clips snipped from movies and TV shows where onscreen Asians are caricaturized to death. Sometimes the surreality of a scene is best accentuated by music that jars against it. Here, the plaintive classic “Love Without End” jars against the onslaught of a painful American tradition.
8. 4:32 AM Life Decisions
Bibi - “Umm… Life”
Hours after the play, Ingrid makes a major decision at 4:32 am. Let me paint the scene: she has a manic, frenzied look in her eye; the room is dark save for moonlight filtering in from the window; and Bibi’s hypnotic “Umm… Life” plays on loop. Because sometimes life throws you for an unexpected loop and all you can really say is, “Umm…”
9. Unsexy Sexy Time
Lexie Liu - “Sleep Away”
Ingrid’s fiancé Stephen Greene is into role-play, specifically the kind where he is a “sensei” disciplining a schoolgirl. After Ingrid’s thirtieth birthday dinner, he attempts to seduce her by laying naked on their bed save for a plaid tie around his neck and a wooden ruler in his hand. Lexie Liu’s languorous “Sleep Away” sets the mood until it comes to a screeching halt when Ingrid hallucinates her fiancé has morphed into Xiao-Wen Chou.
10. Make It Up to Me at the County Fair
Yumi Matsutoya - “Surf Tengoku, Ski Tengoku”
Free version (live recording)
After a tense post-reunion argument, Stephen apologizes to Ingrid by taking her to the county fair. For a few blissful moments, Yumi Matsutoya’s “Surf Tengoku, Ski Tengoku” scores a cheesy montage of the couple engaging in all the usual diversions, from playing fair games to cheering for a pig race. The two of them are happy–for now.
11. Chaos & Chokeholds
Rina Sawayama - “STFU!”
The end of Disorientation culminates in Ingrid giving her dissertation defense in a crowded amphitheater. Tensions escalate, secrets are spilled and before you know it, chaos ensues. Ingrid’s bottled-up rage is unleashed as she storms the stage and chokes out her advisor, all while Rina Sawayama’s galvanizing “STFU!” shakes the walls. Please watch the music video for the intro that cleverly skewers a white man for his Japanphile ways.
12. Karaoke Love
Teresa Teng - “Ban Chun Hong”
After Ingrid is booted out of her PhD program, and her graduate housing, she moves back in with her parents. Though they haven’t spent much quality time together in the past, the trio make up for it now by partaking in wholesome activities: feeding geese, bowling, and of course, singing karaoke. Ingrid’s father, Bo, belts out a song in Hokkien by Taiwanese darling, Teresa Teng, that brings his daughter to tears. A fitting to end our playlist, as Ingrid soon prepares to visit Taiwan for the first time.
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, her short fiction appears in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online, and Ploughshares. Disorientation is her first novel.
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