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.

Anna Badkhen’s essay collection To See Beyond profoundly observes and relates stories of survivors and hope in these dark times.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Soul-stirring. . . . A quietly moving tribute to survivors of global upheaval.”

In her own words, here is Anna Badkhen’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection To See Beyond:

To See Beyond came together at the time of genocide and the rise of fascism, and it is a book of radical reimagining: a collection of essays that probe the ways we ward off despair and imagine the vocabulary we need for survival. In our hyper-informed digital era of patriarchal panic, climate catastrophe, and historically unmatched migration that frequently confronts unutterable violence, this book foregrounds hope as a form of resistance—or, as my poet-friend Gary Whited once put it, it tells “at least the beginning of the story of a future that is of the possible, and not the inevitable.” And so, in this playlist, I am offering you music that filled me with the most hope during the sinister months and years of writing and editing the essays in this book, and music that, I hope, offers you, too, a heartspace in which to dream differently.

1. Our Years of Magical Thinking

“Atalaya” by Dezron Douglas

In the first year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I listened to Dezron’s record, Atalaya, on repeat. If you’ve been to Dezron’s concerts, you know that they always begin with the sonic blessing you hear in the beginning of this song. Or perhaps it is a call to attention. I want the first piece in my essay collection to serve as such a blessing or attunement, to set the tone for what we have at hand and an intention for what we are hoping to reach.

For thirty years I have been recording the violence we commit against one another, and still I am at a loss about human nature, about men deporting families and marching children to an abat­toir, about a country caging children who don’t speak its language, about an army firebombing refugees in their sleep, about men walking into a village and shooting its elders dead. You might say our capacity for magical thinking is the antidote to our capacity for atrocity. But I want to believe that radical hope is more than a balancing act—that it is, in fact, a call to attention, an attunement, a setting of intention and direction. The anthropologist Paul Stoller says a sense of wonder leads us to change, because wonder helps us expand our imagination, which, in turn, takes us to a space of creativity where we can think up a better future

2. Mythologizing Disaster

“Tamir (for Tamir Rice)” by Jaleel Shaw

This tribute for Tamir Rice, the African-American child a police officer lynched in 2012, makes you rise at attention; there, it impales you. And, hopefully, it also reminds you of the singularity of every child murdered in the name of colonialism, everywhere in the world: in Palestine, in Congo, in Sudan, in Ukraine.

The title character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello proposes that to broadcast violence is obscene “because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden forever in the bow­els of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one’s sanity.” Years ago, when I first read this passage, I interpreted it as a prohi­bition against documenting violence. Maybe a true writer of conscience, I had thought then with moral dread, is one who never puts down a single word. Now I see that it is the last clause—if one wishes to save one’s sanity—that is the key to deciphering the quote: Why must we save our sanity? Who said we ought to stay sane? How is it even decent to remain sane in this insane world we are so recklessly and callously deranging? It is a kind of madness to always hear the keening of the dead, this hurt canticle. It is a madness not to hear.

3-5. Souvenirs of Climate Catastrophe

“Ptah, the El Daoud” by Alice Coltrane

“Afro Blue” by McCoy Tyner

“A l’ecoute du moro” by Ablaye Cissok

The seas are rising, the icebergs are melting, Siberia is ablaze, a third of Pakistan is underwater, heat-struck birds are falling out of the sky in India, and a record-setting heat wave has shrunk the Yangtze River to a record low. In Central Europe, rivers running dry after yet another heat wave are once again revealing mementos left behind by suffer­ers of historic droughts past. Hunger stones—river boulders that people living through droughts petroglyphed with dates and descriptions of their woe—commemorate the years of bad harvest, scarcity, high prices, hunger: 1417, 1616, 1707, 1746, 1790, 1800, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868, 1892, 1893. One inscription, near Bleck­ede, in Lower Saxony, reads: “When this goes under, life will become more colorful again”; another, near the Czech town of Děčín-Podmokly: “If you see me, then weep.” On the same boulder, someone else later chiseled: “Don’t cry girl, when the field is dry, water it.” Many of the hunger stones on the Elbe River surfaced for the first time in many years in the summer of 2018, when Greenpeace, too, left a message on a boulder near Magdeburg: “If you see me, it’s climate crisis. August 2018.”

What other markers will we leave behind? It is hard at times to think beyond scorched forests and submerged farmlands, almost one-fifth of our planet unlivable for humans, the predicted mass die-off of at least a million species, disintegrating factories and mines leeching poison into soil, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In my mind, I try to tell my private beads of our aspirations: the ethe­real Afrofuturism of Diébédo Francis Kéré’s architecture; the James Webb Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider; the artist Katie Paterson’s engagements with deep time and space; the unflinching bronzes of Simone Leigh; biomedical research advances that will help save hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of lives; Carlo Rovelli’s playful physics; Alice Coltrane and Ablaye Cissoko; Wole Soyinka; Beethoven; Euripides; Jay Wright . . .

6. How to Fly Kites

“Kite (for Refaat Alareer)” by Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith

It is no wonder that Refaat Alareer’s poem, “If I Must Die,” has stirred so many souls: in Vijay Iyer’s words, “a kite is, generally speaking, a universal symbol of freedom.” In this poem, Alareer—whom Israel murdered in Gaza in December 2023—forever pins a kite to an angel, pins the angel to the bomb-sieved sky, pins our grief to the most improbable, the most defiant, the most lasting wonder of hope. “He invites the reader to make a kite and fly it so that a child might see it and imagine that it’s an angel,” Iyer told NPR. “The way that it might spark some moment of inspiration or imagination in the observer is the key insight. It’s sort of like the whole poem hinges on that truth, and so it felt like the best I could do in tribute to him was to do what he asked, and to try to build a kite, a sonic kite.”

We are left, as we often are, to wonder. To receive wonder, we hold out both hands. When the wonder is too much, when there is too much wonder, we raise our arms in the air, to the heavens, as if we are tethering a kite, as if we are holding on to a kite, the pure light up there.

7. The Language of Birds

“Birds Canticum” by Dhafer Youssef

Was music the first language in the universe? I have heard an origin story in which birds teach the Creator the importance of song; according to this story, until then, apparently the Creator had not thought song necessary. The notion that music is an afterthought I find preposterous; then again, I often find myself at odds with the Creator.

8. Lamb

“Breaths” by Sweet Honey in the Rock

You might ask: how to reconcile so much death and so much hope? We can start by acknowledging that our beloved dead are the most reliable presences in our lives. I have dedicated this book to my dear friend and older brother, Rev. Yielbonzie Charles Johnson, who joined his ancestors in spring of 2023. I miss our conversations dearly, though of course they haven’t stopped just because Yielbonzie died, as he likes to remind me through one of his favorite songs, Ysaye Barnwell’s musical translation of the poem “Souffles” by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop:

Listen more often to things than to beings
Listen more often to things than to beings
‘Tis the ancestor’s breath when the fire’s voice is heard
‘Tis the ancestor’s breath in the voice of the water.

Those who have died have never, never left
The dead are not under the earth
They are in the rustling trees
They are in the groaning woods
They are in the crying grass,
They are in the moaning rocks
The dead are not under the earth.

I hope this playlist—and the book—help you do something Yielbonzie did well: listen closely, and love accordingly.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Anna Badkhen’s playlist for her essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality

Anna Badkhen’s playlist for her book Walking with Abel

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Anna Badkhen is the author of eight books of nonfiction, including To See Beyond and Bright Unbearable Reality, longlisted for the National Book Award. Born in the Soviet Union and a former war correspondent, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award for Excellence in Peace and Justice Journalism, among other honors. She is an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia. For more information, visit www.annabadkhen.com.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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.

Ananda Devi’s All Flesh is one of the year’s most startling, moving, and amazing novels.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Sensual and provocative . . . the narrative hurtles through a series of striking twists, driven in part by the pesky inner voice of the narrator’s twin sister. An epigraph from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer sets the carnal and gleefully filthy tone, and Devi never lets up. The reader won’t be able to look away from this singular work”

In her own words, here is Ananda Devi’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel All Flesh:

Of all the novels I have written, All Flesh holds a special place in my heart, because it led me on a very different path from those I tended to follow: an unexpected, strange wilderness that began with a quote by Henry Miller, with a painting of a full-fleshed woman, and with some idle reflections about people’s relationship with food as I was waiting in different airports in the US. I started writing it without knowing where it would lead me to, only with that image of a young girl who might have started life, with the throw of the dice, as an enormous baby. Her mind and her body became the place where the novel took place, and for once I didn’t ground the story in a specific country, although there are slight hints here and there that it might be Switzerland (I live in France, on the Swiss border). It is definitely set in a European country, not Mauritius or India where most of my novels are set. Despite this outwardly affluent setting, I feel the use of the word “wilderness” is apt, since my narrator, now an adolescent girl suffering from morbid obesity, has to make her way through the dangerous and relentlessly cruel paths of teenage harassment, amplified by the deleterious impact of social media. Abandoned by her American mother (a small link to the fact that the story originated when I was on a book tour there), she is nurtured by her loving, but deluded father, who tries to assuage her shame about her weight by telling her she was originally one of twin baby girls in the womb. He treats her as if she were twins, so he feeds both of them with his culinary feasts. For her, though, this myth means that she devoured her twin in the womb, so that she is now haunted by her shadow.

In the end, there is no place of safety for her, whether at home or in the society at large, where she is looked upon with disgust and condemnation for her supposed gluttony. It’s a novel about loneliness, about consumption and about the body – a place of safety and danger.

Music inspiration

I usually listen to music when I am writing. Mostly music without words so that the poetry doesn’t interfere with my own words.  When I am not writing, I listen to Indian music and songs, to Western classical music and songs from the ’70s and ’80s when I was a student in London, to Mauritian music – a very eclectic mix! However, as I was writing All Flesh, a few pieces seemed to run in my head, mostly about loneliness, very melancholy, as a kind of ode to the utter solitude of my young narrator, trapped in her own body.

The first of those is a song I have loved forever: Eleanor Rigby, by the Beatles. There are many songs by the Beatles that I love, but this one, which is less known that the others, is an extraordinary alliance of the beauty of Paul Mc Cartney’s voice, of the wording and of the music.

Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

This very strange and poetic line, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door, makes me think of how none of us shows our true face to others. But it is also about invisibility: this is indeed one of the recurring themes in my books, whether it is very old people, transgender men and women or prostitutes in India, or an obese girl, who are so visible that we only see their outer selves and never stop to think about their inner selves, never stop to understand who they are and where they belong. It’s a song I can listen to again and again and never tire of it, discovering new meanings every time. Eleanor Rigby / Died in the church and was buried along with her name / Nobody came.

Nobody came.

Another piece accompanied the writing of a crucial and heart-breaking passage of the book, when, after so many years, the narrator’s mother comes back to see her, not expecting to see how huge she has become. The girl prefers to hide under the beautiful quilt her father bought for the occasion, watching her impossibly thin mother through a hole in the fabric. In the end, the mother will only have the courage to look at her hand and to hold it, never insisting on seeing her daughter again.

It was Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater that played while I was writing this, interpreted by Philippe Jaroussky and his ensemble Artaserse. I can only understand a few of the Latin words, of course, but it is about the Virgin Mary weeping in front of the cross where Christ has been crucified. The music and the voice fully convey this meaning, and I don’t think I have ever heard anything that seizes the heart and soul with so much pain and love and passion and compassion. As soon I hear the word dolorosa, I begin to weep. Oh Mother, fount of love, make me feel the power of sorrow, that I may grieve with you. I believe all mothers must feel these words as if they were spoken to them alone… Although, here, it was for the daughter that I cried.

Towards the end of the novel – one of the hardest passages I have written –, I listened to the Tunisian artist Emel Mathlouthi, in particular a song entitled Instant, from the album Ensen. It is sung in Arabic, a language I don’t understand, but so poignant is this song that I looked for the English translation. It is, again, about grief and loneliness. How can it not resonate with us in these terrible times? My narrator’s self-sacrifice became a metaphor for a humanity that is losing all sense of humanness and compassion, where Mammon and the gods of consumption reign supreme in the richest parts of the world, where money has become the only divinity for those who have the most, and the rest of the world is left to the ravages of misery, hunger and war:

How to explain what’s crushed inside me and that I don’t understand
I stand silent for singing deserted me
I look haggard at what’s surrounding me
I wish to not move or open my door
This is my state,
At this instant

As with Stabat Mater, her voice and the music say it all: no need to understand the language.

One of the characters in the book is a man called René (which means reborn in French), a carpenter who comes to free her when she is stuck in a doorway. He was homeless at one point of his life. He thus understands how she feels, this all too visible invisibility, as the firemen called in by her father to help her look in horror at her body. He is as thin as she is obese, but their solitude is the same. A love story emerges from this encounter. Trying to imagine René, I thought of a song from the end of the 1960s, sung by the French singer of Greek origin, George Moustaki: Le métèque. The title of the song is a pejorative word used by French people at the time for immigrants of Mediterranean origin. There is a weary but resilient acceptation of who he is in this poetic text, and I could imagine René, both singing it in his raspy smoker’s voice to my narrator and looking somewhat like George Moustaki himself, saying that he will come to his sweet prisoner, his soul-mate, his life source, he will come to her with his ugly immigrant mug, his wandering Jew’s face, his Greek sheperd’s look, a thief and a vagabond, and he will drink in her youth and will become, as she choses, a noble prince, a dreamer or an adolescent, and they will make of each day an eternity of love that they will live until their death:

Avec ma gueule de métèque
De Juif errant, de pâtre grec
De voleur et de vagabond
Je viendrai, ma douce captive
Mon âme sœur, ma source vive
Je viendrai boire tes vingt ans
Et je serai prince de sang
Rêveur ou bien adolescent

Comme il te plaira de choisir
Et nous ferons de chaque jour
Toute une éternité d’amour
Que nous vivrons à en mourir

This magnificent song haunted those of my generation and the next, as it spoke to all of us who had been judged on the basis of our appearances or our origins. Both my protagonists have felt the full impact of this judgement.

It isn’t easy to jump from a 1960s French song to an 18th century sufi poem sung in urdu by a Pakistani singer, Abida Parveen. But the theme of love and madness and wonder weaves a tapestry that encompasses both songs, and perhaps all my song choices. Entitled Mujhe Bekhudi, from the album Raqs-e-bismil, it begins with a quote from the renowned sufi poet Rumi:

Bewilderment has absolved me of both worlds
This is the consequence of awakening from my dream.

It then moves to a poem by Hazrat Shah Niaz, enlarging upon the theme of moving beyond the quotidian preoccupations of our worldly existence to achieve a different way of being and of seeing, which is one of the themes of this book and of several of my novels:

The eyes of an anguished heart open
No longer moist, bereft of tears
The perplexed vision
Remained unmoved… Devoid of response
The soul heard an unusual sound
That plucked at the strings of life
As wondrous love revealed itself

I read these verses and listen to them and wonder what the poet is really saying. Perhaps it is that when the heart first opens itself to this other way of seeing, it doesn’t know how to respond, remaining initially unmoved, until it hears the true sound of the universe? This is an image frequently used in sufi poetry, where the language and symbolism of “romantic” and sensual love are transformed to express a transcendent form of devotion. The sufi’s quest is an individual and lonely one, subsumed in the beauty of music, poetry and dance through which a kind of grace is achieved. My narrator too achieves a kind of transcendance through her inner quest. I also hope that, despite the difficult subject of my novel, I too am able to guide the reader along its dark roads through the power of writing and poetry.

My narrator lives in a half-fictional world, created by her father’s invention of a ghost twin and by the “stories” made up about her on social media. She ends up thinking that her love story, too, is a fiction. This brought to my mind a beautiful Tracy Chapman song, Telling stories, which is about how we fill in the spaces between each other or even in our minds with stories that we tell ourselves. The video that accompanies this song shows Chapman travelling in a subway car and seeing the people around her as stories, which is also what Virginia Woolf used to do when travelling in a train: she would look at them and invent their lives in her own mind, which might result in short-stories or characters in her novels.

There is fiction in the space between
The lines on your page of memories

Write it down but it doesn’t mean
You’re not just telling stories

There is fiction in the space between you and me
(…) between
You and reality

You will do and say anything
To make your everyday life
Seem less mundane

The entire song is like a short-story in itself: A fabrication a grand scheme / Where I am the scary monster / I eat the city

These last lines seem to describe so well what goes on in the mind of my narrator…

I eat the city.

The devouring monster that my protagonist can seem to be is a reflection on our overwhelming consumption, which will in fact devour our world. The idea of the city as the place where solitude consumes us too has long been part of my imagery. The poetry of T. S. Eliot has been ever-present as an inspiration. In this case, I thought of the Preludes:

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
(…)
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

This last image brings us back to Eleanor Rigby picking the rice thrown in front of a church, probably because she is hungry. But also, this infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, what is it?

The compassion that we are losing so fast?

The music that I hear in my mind when I read this poem of Eliot is a song by Gerry Rafferty that I used to listen to during my student years: Baker Street.

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well, another crazy day, you’ll drink the night away
And forget about everything

This city desert makes you feel so cold
It’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul
And it’s taken you so long to find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything

I realise that, the older I get, the more I go back to the music that enthralled me as a young woman finding her own feet. I think these songs would have helped my narrator too. They definitely helped me shape and define her as I embarked in this rather harrowing, but ultimately fulfilling novel.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Born in Mauritius, Ananda Devi is a multi-award winning novelist, short-story writer and poet. Translated into a dozen languages, she is considered a powerful voice in modern African writing in French. Winner of the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature for the entirety of her work, she holds a PhD in social anthropology from SOAS, London, where she lived for several years. She has also lived in Congo-Brazzaville and currently resides in Ferney-Voltaire, France. In 2023 she won the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro for Sylvia P., a biographical essay on American poet Sylvia Plath; the Prix Étonnants Voyageurs for her novel Manger l’autre (2018). In 2015, she was featured at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. In 2014, she was awarded the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises by the Académie Française. She won the Prix Mokanda (2012). She was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2010 and won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie (2006) for Ève de ses décombres, published in English as Eve out of Her Ruins (2016).

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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.

James Ciano’s debut poetry collection The Committee of Men exquisitely explores themes of toxic masculinity and masculine identity.

Edward Hirsch wrote of the book:

“In this haunted and haunting book of initiations, James Ciano takes on a past and a subject matter seldom encountered in poetry—the harsh, glaring, unpoetical world of grueling masculinity. With John Keats and James Wright as two of his guides, he uses the transformative power of poetry to confront and transfigure his longstanding demons. This deeply humane collection left me shaking, shocked, and enthralled.”

In his own words, here is James Ciano’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut poetry collection The Committee of Men:

Some of the songs here intersect with the book’s themes, but most of them are here because they for one reason or another provided spiritual, emotional or psychological guidance in the making of these poems.

Home by Six Organs of Admittance

I’ve always admired Ben Chasny’s work. This song, with the freighted simplicity of its title, spoke to me through its juxtapositions. Most especially the emotional dissonance between the sweetness of the repeated acoustic chords and the distortion of the electric guitar on top of it. Something about the distortion I find beautiful and devastating. Like looking at a face that you love, and then looking at a face that you love while it rides the graviton. And how those two faces are alive at all times inside the same face.

Teenage Spaceship by Smog

Perhaps no song better captures the time of being alive as a teenager. The charged way in which, at that age, the suburban can take on the characteristics of the sublime, the other-worldly. The singular feeling of being alive, of being awake after everyone in a house, or a neighborhood has already gone to sleep.

Banshee Beat by Animal Collective

“You have your fits I have my fits, but feeling is good.” Feeling is good. What a hard thing to remember. So much of this book was written from inside tremendous states of not-feeling, or feelingless-ness. What I wouldn’t have given to feel anything, while inside the worst vortices of depression.

You Can Make Me Feel Bad by Arthur Russell

Shame is a recurring feeling in these poems. Self-hatred, too.

I had the great privilege of hearing this performed by the Los Angeles new music collective, Wild Up, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.  

“There’s a place for us in the real world” is a reminder I think anyone who has ever felt isolated or alone should hear. I can sing it to them!

Do Your Best by John Maus

A poem from the book draws its title from this classic. I wrote a bit about the poem here, for the Poetry Society of America. As I’ve put this playlist together, and the book for that matter, there’s an obvious trajectory from isolation to connection. Isn’t that what it’s all about? I feel romantically, now, about the suffering I once felt. This song helps me feel tenderly towards that time.

Envelop by Julianna Barwick

If I had to pick a most listened to album over the course of writing this book it would be Julianna Barwick’s A Magic Place. This song is the opening track to that album, though I could’ve picked any song for this. As a boy, I once thought that every part of me was a part of everything else in the world. If I looked at that tree or that swatch of sky or that train by my window, I could feel a little bit of me pulled toward each thing. Julianna Barwick’s music gives me that feeling, again. Or, makes me feel like that feeling was more real than I realized.

I Heard You Looking by Yo La Tengo

A beloved teacher of mine once talked about poems (but also our lives) as a negotiation between chaos and order. I think it’s a principle I find especially compelling in music as well. This closing track is one of the great cacophonous journeys from melody to noise to melody again, a purification through sonic dissolution and a manic cathartic release. Control lost then recomposed, but changed in the recomposing. Sometimes poems seem so orderly to me. I’ve always wanted to capture, in language, the feeling that this song gives me.

I Shall Love 2 by Julia Holter

A rallying cry against the darkness. This song kept me believing in the tangible things of my life, even when they seemed most empty, or just beyond my reach. It’s hard to listen to this song and not immediately feel like color has rushed back into each thing that once seemed muted and distant to you.

Coney Island Baby by Lou Reed

I have a poem in The Committee of Men called “Coney Island Baby,” which draws on the language and themes of Lou Reed’s anthem. It is the song my book is most indebted to. Love saves. 

And the glory of love, glory of love
Glory of love just might come through

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

James Ciano is a poet. Originally from New York, he currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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 Ultranatural an immersive pageturner, a captivating story of friendship and fame.

Sadie Dupois wrote of the book:

“In a ramped-up retelling of the pop starlet mythos, Ultranatural charts the converse curves of fame-seeking and holy bestiedom through the literary tradition of posting like your life depends on it. Wuehle’s shades-dark humor and astute weirdness are pitch-perfect, autotuned to ring out an alien gloss of mystic uncanny.”

In her own words, here is Candice Wuehle’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Ultranatural:

Before Ultranatural’s protagonist becomes a pop star so big she goes by one name alone—Love—she is Lacey Dove Bart: a girl from Appalachia raised on the waves of a classic rock station, where she learns defiance from Tom Petty and longing from Bruce Springsteen.

Songs from Petty, Springsteen, Dolly Parton, and Elvis form the emotional architecture of Ultranatural, but they also establish its central tension: the relationship between work and freedom. So much of American rock music is about labor—about what you owe, what you endure, and what you’re simply never going to escape. As I was writing, I listened often to Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” rewinding and relistening to The Boss groan, “I got debts no honest man can pay.” It’s a line that quickly, quietly captures the raw desperation of trying to live with dignity inside systems designed to extract from you. Lacey isn’t a ‘70s rock goddess, though, she’s an early aughts pop princess, more reminiscent of Britney Spears than Bruce Springsteen. Identical initials aside, the commanality between these two artists that most impressed me as I was writing was the repetition the message of “Atlantic City” as it resurfaces the polished brutality of Spears’ 2013 hit, “Work Bitch.”

For both Britney and Lacey, fame is not a release from labor but its most intensified form—an existence in which the self becomes both product and worker, endlessly optimized, endlessly visible. We’ve already seen how the American dream of becoming self-made can collapse into something far darker. In her 2022 memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears’ details the way her Las Vegas residency unfolded while she was under a conservatorship that controlled nearly every aspect of her life, her labor extracted on a relentless schedule even as her autonomy was stripped away. The very talent that should have secured her freedom instead bound her to a system that treated her less like a person and more like a resource.

This playlist traces that arc: from classic rock’s narratives of survival to the hyper-produced imperatives of pop, where freedom is marketed as a reward for submission. It’s the sound of a girl becoming an icon—and the persistent, unsettling question of what it costs to keep working once your life no longer belongs to you.

“9 to 5” – Dolly Parton

“They let you dream just to watch ’em shatter / You’re just a step on the boss man’s ladder / But you got dreams he’ll never take away/ In the same boat as a lot of your friends”

I was an eleven-year-old totally hypnotized by this comedy about labor rights and sexual harassment. It’s possible that growing up thinking the messages in 9 to 5 were normal is the reason why I’m like this today, and it’s certain that in the movie’s titular song, Dolly Parton gets at something central to Ultranatural: the idea that we are allowed to dream only within limits. When Parton sings, “they let you dream just to watch them shatter,” she acknowledges the insidious system we’re all in; the hurt locker in which we position ourselves as both participant in and victim of a system that thrives on aspiration. Yet—crucially—there remains something that cannot be extracted or owned in the “dreams he’ll never take away.” This tension (and hope) became a kind of thesis for me while writing the book: what does it mean to have and hold a dream that resists commodification? In the final act of Ultranatural, Lacey enters a sort of astral plane untouched by capitalism, where her inner life is no longer colonized and desire exists outside of productivity. What I love about the next move in “9 to 5” is that is understands that even in the most exploitative conditions, there’s still a collective interiority—“in the same boat with a lot of your friends.”

“Atlantic City” – Bruce Springsteen

“I got debts no honest man can pay.”

If Dolly gives us structure, Springsteen gives us tension. This is a narrative song, a story about a man whose back is so against the wall he decides to do a job for the mafia. The nakedness of Springsteen’s reckoning with debt, obligation, and the sense that you’re already behind before you have even truly begun has always rung truer to me than a hopeful pop anthem. Ultranatural takes place around the 2008 financial crash and in addition to being a book about a pop star, is a book about a generation of American’s born back on their heels, obliged to take deals their parents never had to for a whole lot less. Lacey’s outsized, monstrous ambition doesn’t emerge from nowhere; it emerges from a soul deep sense that she’s got debts no honest man can pay.

“Born to Run” – Bruce Springsteen

“It’s a death trap/ it’s a suicide rap.”

I have a theory that no Springsteen song is about what you thought it was about the first several hundred times you heard it. Case in point, I grew up thinking “Born to Run” was a victory song, the soundtrack of getting to a better place. Actually, though, this is a song about trying to figure out a way to “live with the sadness” of knowing the game is rigged and hope isn’t coming to your town. The best-case scenario in this world, as in most stories about the crushing weight of capitalism, is to love each other “with all the madness” and to dwell in a spirit of resistance; of running even if there’s nowhere to go. Springsteen is mentioned directly by Lacey many times in Ultranatural and when she’s at the end of running, it’s the fact that art like his managed to exist at all that keeps her going.

“I Won’t Back Down” – Tom Petty

“You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down.”

This lyric becomes an integral part of the plot of Ultranatural, but I’ll let you read to find out how…

“Take Me Home, Country Roads” – Lana Del Rey

“Driving down the road/ I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday/ yesterday.”

I’ve never met a successful American artist who didn’t carry a shattering sense of urgency—the feeling not just that there’s more to do, but that everything should have already been done. That pressure runs parallel to the truer fear that in leaving, you may have already gone too far to return. I think of Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi”—“Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long”—a line that reframes departure not as escape, but as a kind of irreversible miscalculation. In Ultranatural, this is Lacey’s condition. Her life becomes a series of forward movements that can’t be undone, each success pulling her further from any real sense of home.

I chose Lana Del Rey’s version of this song because there’s a moment in the novel when Lacey begins performing covers of the music she was raised on—songs that feel, to her, like a private language—but her label refuses to let her record them. Meanwhile, another artist (modeled on Del Rey) is permitted that sort of authorship. The result is the realization that the things that feel most internally meaningful to Lacey are precisely the things she cannot express within the system that made her famous. Even her longing for home is mediated, managed, and, ultimately, denied.

“Dorothea” – Taylor Swift

“If you’re ever tired of being known for who you know / You know you’ll always know me.”

Famously, this is a song Taylor Swift wrote about one of her only real peers in fame, Selena Gomez. But it’s also one of the clearest articulations I’ve heard of what it means to be truly known. The line hinges on a quiet distinction: between being known for something—your proximity, your image, your status—and being known by someone who remembers you before any of that took hold. In Ultranatural, Lacey’s closest grasp at this salvation is her childhood best friend, Carrie-Anne, the one person who exists outside the machinery of her fame.

The older I get, the more I understand how rare that is—to have not just someone who remembers your past, but someone who remembers it the way you do. Someone who holds a shared version of you that hasn’t been revised by success, commodified by an audience, or distorted by time. In a life increasingly structured by systems that reshape identity, that kind of witness becomes a form of continuity. I believe to be known in this way by friend—a person who chooses you every day not because they legally have to, but because they really know you—is our closest portal to accessing the self that can survive being turned into something else.

“Work Bitch” – Britney Spears

“You better work, bitch.”

If you don’t hear a phantom Britney whisper “You wanna a hot body? You better work, bitch” in your ear every single time you do sit ups, you might not have been a young woman in the early aughts. I love how this song says the quiet part out loud. For the epigraph of Ultranatural, I pair a variation on this song with the Marx quote: “The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.” I don’t think any two statements more accurately sum up the double bind of American success.

“Oh No!” – MARINA

“I know exactly what I want and who I want to be/ I know exactly why I walk and talk like a machine/ I’m now becoming my own self-fulfilled prophecy”

I actually heard “Oh No!” for the first time after finishing Ultranatural, but I wanted to include it because it captures the moment where self-definition becomes self-surveillance—where knowing exactly who you want to be starts to feel like a trap you can’t deviate from.

“Everything Is Romantic” – Charli XCX (ft. Caroline Polachek)

“It’s like you’re living the dream but not living your life.”

Charli XCX is probably the pop star saying the most interesting things about fame right now, which is incredible since she’s also so deeply inside of the machine of fame at this point. One of the most compelling things about bratis that it takes place right before full blown household name Charli emerges. She writes from the threshold—close enough to see its full machinery, but not fully subsumed. She describes having one foot in the real world and one foot inside the spectacle, and it’s that in-between state that gives the album its tension. The question isn’t simply whether you want success, but whether you’re willing to cross the point where success becomes totalizing.

In Ultranatural, Lacey reaches that threshold and then passes it. What Charli captures as ambivalence becomes, for Lacey, a condition: the realization that going all in doesn’t just mean achieving the dream, but discovering that the dream may never have been yours to begin with. The closer she gets to the version of life she was supposed to want, the more estranged she becomes from the self who wanted it.

“Golden G String” – Miley Cyrus

“You call me crazy / have you looked around this place?”

This isn’t one of Miley’s biggest hits, but it’s my personal favorite.  I love how explicitly “Golden G String” revisits the moment that was meant to define and diminish her—her 2013 MTV Video Music Awards performance, where her sexuality was treated as spectacle and then weaponized against her. Here, years later, she reclaims that narrative with clarity and control, reframing what was once scandal as something more like revelation and reckoning. An understanding that the system that called her crazy was just describing…itself. It’s a win not just for Miley, but for everybody who took what happened as a cautionary tale and made themselves smaller, quieter, less just to appease “the old boys who hold all the cards.”

also at Largehearted Boy:

Candice Wuehle’s playlist for her novel Monarch

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Candice Wuehle is author of Monarch, Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed, Death Industrial Complex, and BOUND. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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.

Helen Benedict’s novel The Soldier’s House is a spellbinding look at how war effects both families and individuals.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“The characters’ journeys are candid and vulnerable, rendering a pertinent, rich portrait of displaced lives reshaped by conflict and its enduring consequences.”

In her own words, here is Helen Benedict’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Soldier’s House:

As I watch Trump’s new war with Iran spreading throughout the region, ending thousands of lives, displacing thousands more people, and costing the American taxpayer more than one billion dollars a day, I cannot help but be reminded of the last time the U.S. went to war for no reason with disastrous consequences: Iraq 2003.

My new novel, The Soldier’s House, takes place during that war, in 2010, seven years after our initial invasion. The soldier of the title is Sgt. Jimmy Donnell, who survived several deployments to Iraq, during which he grew as close to his Iraqi interpreter, Khalil Pachachi, as a brother. When Khalil is killed for working with Americans, Jimmy feels so devastated and responsible that he and his wife, Kate Brady, also a Iraq War veteran, sponsor Khalil’s wife, Naema Jassim, their little son Tariq, and Khalil’s mother, Hibah, to come to their small town in upstate New York and live with them.

While Jimmy and Kate fix up the old pool room at the back of their house for Naema and her family, they pull up the old shag carpet, clean mouse droppings out the chest of drawers, and take down their posters of their favorite band, Modest Mouse. As they work, I imagine them singing along to the band’s mega 2004 hit, Float On.

What Jimmy does not foresee is that later that very night, Kate will inexplicably disappear.

Naema’s view of the situation is entirely different. To her, Jimmy is no better than her enemy, responsible for her husband’s death and the loss of Tariq’s leg in the same bomb that killed Khalil, just as she sees Jimmy’s army as was responsible for destroying her country. She knows that she and her family would have been hunted down and killed had they stayed in Iraq, so she must recognize that Jimmy saved their lives. But how she is to tolerate being rescued by her enemy, let alone sharing his house, is a central dilemma of the novel.

Music runs throughout The Soldier’s House as this plot unfolds, played on a little cassette recorder, the car radio, on an iPod (remember those?), or simply in the heads of the characters, especially that of little Tariq, who is only five years old when the novel opens and becomes quickly besotted with American pop music.

“The music filtering through the iPod and earphones Jimmy lent Tariq is a mix of the Coldplay and U2 Jimmy wants Tariq to like, the high-pitched women singers Tariq favors, and Hibah’s oud music. Naema wanted Tariq to listen to children’s songs in English, but he met this suggestion with scorn. He doesn’t care for all of Jimmy’s music, either, the aggressive guitars and growling male singers stirring his old, frightening dreams. Nor does he like the yearning notes of the oud, which put an ache behind his eyes. But he does enjoy the perky voices of Beyoncé  and Taylor Swift, and a beat that makes him bounce in his seat.”

Meanwhile, Hibah, Tariq’s grandmother, has an especially difficult time adjusting to her new life in America, for, as Naema puts it, “as hard as exile has been on me and Tariq, it is harder for her, the old having so much more to forget and so much less to anticipate.” But Hibah does take comfort in her own Iraqi oud music, the oud being a string instrument like a cross between a lute and a guitar with a particularly haunting, soulful sound.

 “Later that afternoon, with the sun dying the lawn a coppery gold, Hibah sets to cooking supper in our tiny kitchen, the oud music on her treasured cassette player singing to us of home and the wisdom of Allah.”

The oud also makes Naema think back to her life in Iraq, and her little brother Zaki’s love of his guitar and familiar Beatle songs.

“Zaki would bring his guitar and play for us while we hid, a mix of the old Iraqi tunes Baba insisted he learn and his favorite Western pop songs, one I remember about a blackbird, another about peace.”

I was thinking of John Lennon’s famous anthem, Imagine, here, and how I once heard that song sung by a group of refugees who were imprisoned in a camp in Greece. When the young Liberian singer sang the verse, “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too,” I was moved to tears, for everyone around me that day had suffered untold hardships exactly because of those countries and religions. As do millions of other refugees around the world today.

In stark contrast to Lennon’s song of peace is the heavy metal of AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, and the gangsta rap that fueled so much of the Iraq War. Soldiers have been pumping themselves up with aggressive music for millennia, starting with the drums of war, but in Iraq they not only played it as they drove around the desert, but also blasted it nonstop and at top volume as a way of torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Even Jimmy, who is a gentle soul at heart, needs his occasional fix of macho tunes.

“Back at the start of the war, Jimmy had been the barefoot, scruffy type on his furloughs home, the unshaven, beer-with-breakfast type. But the events of his last tour knocked all that out of him and now he’s pure army. Five hundred push-ups every morning. A twelve- klick speed run around Slingerlands. An hour lifting weights in the basement to ear-crunching heavy metal.”

But to return to a happier moment — little Tariq and his ipod in the car:

“Naema twists around from the front to watch him, his eager face tiny between the earphones, his head bobbing to the music as he hums along. For so many years she feared that the war and loss of his father and leg would drain the happiness from him forever. But look at him now.”

also at Largehearted Boy:

Helen Benedict’s playlist for her novel The Good Deed

Helen Benedict and Eyad Awwadawnan’s playlist for their book Map of Hope and Sorrow

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Helen Benedict is a novelist and journalist specializing in refugees, the effects of war on civilians and soldiers, social injustice, and on violence against women. Her most recent book, the novel, The Good Deed (2024) is a finalist for the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her related nonfiction book, Map of Hope: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece (2022), and her recent articles have focused on Middle Eastern and African refugees, while her earlier work covered Iraqi refugees in the U.S., American women soldiers, and sexual assault. In 2021, Benedict was awarded the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History.

Benedict’s latest novel about Iraqi refugees in the U.S., The Soldier’s House, was published in April, 2026.

Benedict is credited with breaking the story about the epidemic of sexual assault of military women serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her articles on refugees have been published in The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, Guernica, Arrowsmith Journal and elsewhere; while her work on war is reflected in her novel, “Wolf Season,” (2017, Bellevue), her previous novel “Sand Queen” (2011, Soho Press) and her non- fiction book, “The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq,” (2009 and 2010, Beacon Press), which won her the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism in 2013. Benedict was also named one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s eNews. In 2015, she was a finalist for the U.K. Liberty Human Rights Arts Award for her play, “The Lonely Soldier Monologues.” Her work has also won the EMMA (Exceptional Merit in Media Award) from the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Benedict’s non-fiction book, “The Lonely Soldier,” led to a class-action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of women and men who were sexually assaulted in the military and also inspired the 2012 Oscar- nominated documentary about sexual assault in the military, “The Invisible War.” Her earlier book, “Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes” is widely taught in journalism and law schools and has helped to change the way several newspapers cover sexual assault, while her book, “Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault” is used by rape crisis centers around the country. She has testified twice to Congress as an expert on sexual assault in the military.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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.

Ramona Ausubel’s book Unstuck will inspire writers (and everyone else) with its wisdom and humor.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“An upbeat guide to navigating the writing process . . . Warm-hearted and practical, Ausubel emerges as trustworthy companion for a writer who’s stuck anywhere on the challenging road of creativity. Generous, empathetic, and unfailingly encouraging.”

In her own words, here is Ramona Ausubel’s Book Notes music playlist for her book Unstuck:

So much of what I want this book to be is a hype-beast for whatever it is you most want to write. If you’re starting? Get excited, get going. In that long, long middle? Here’s a whole bunch of ways to stay in it. Need some perspective? Let’s go! Ready to see this thing to the end? This book is here for that. Music is an amazing tone-setter for a writing day. Sometimes I like to listen to something that reminds me of the characters, or the setting. Sometimes I’ll make a playlist that I listen to every time I work on a particular project to drop me into the zone more quickly. This playlist is in two parts: Get Excited & Settle In.

A Side: Get Excited

The first part of this playlist is made up of high energy, makes-me-happy songs to get me pumped up before I write.

“Colors”—Black Pumas

Soulful celebration of everyday life. I’m never unhappy to have this song come on!

“Texas Hold ‘Em”—Beyonce

Writing is “taking it to the floor” in so many ways.

“Changes”—Charlie Puth

This one is thanks to my daughter, who puts this on in the car and we all sing at the top of our lungs. Writing feels quiet, but warming up with some loudness always feels good.

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”—Lauryn Hill

I’m 18 years old, driving my clunky old Saab around Santa Fe. It’s summer, I’m on my way to pick my friends so we can go to Allsups and get sodas and gum and then park at the plaza and play the whole album on repeat. Everything is possible.

B Side: Settle In

Now it’s time to sit down and get ready to actually put words on the page. These songs go from more energetic to more chill as my focus sharpens.

“Sound & Color”—Alabama Shakes

Bright and cheerful and open-hearted. Just how I want to be when I write (even if I’m not always—aspiration!).

“Dusty Trails”—Lucius

I like to sing along to this even though I have terrible pitch and my voice reaches nowhere near the angelic heights theirs do. It reminds me that I’m writing a messy, real emerging thing, not a pristine, finished book.

“Right Back to Me”—Waxahatchee

Feels like lying in the sun on a picnic blanket in the summer. It’s an easy day, and trying something doesn’t seem so hard.

“Ripple”—The Grateful Dead

Though I live in Boulder, I am not a Deadhead (Sorry, Dad!), but this song has always felt like home to me. It’s familiar and steady. Settles me down real nice.

“New World Coming”—Nina Simone

Nina Simone’s voice is like a whole entire universe. It feels expansive—in that depth, there is room for all things, even me. Even my weird sentences.

“San Luis”—Gregory Alan Isakov

This is my very favorite writing music. It’s lovely but not boring, textured and warm but not distracting. It’s a nice combination of sweet and sad. Plus Isakov lives a few miles from me, which makes it feel like inviting a friend over (to be clear, we are friends only my imagination). Chances are good that if I’m writing, his whole oeuvre is in the background.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Ramona Ausubel’s playlist for her novel Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Ramona Ausubel’s playlist for her short story collection A Guide to Being Born

Ramona Ausubel’s playlist for her novel No One is Here Except All of Us

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Ramona Ausubel is the author most recently of Unstuck: 101 Doorways from the Blank Page to the Last Page (Tin House/Zando).

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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.

Bonnie Friedman’s novel Don’t Stop is a vividly told and moving debut.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“This coming-of-middle-age story explores a woman’s obsessive affair and the unraveling of her life… A fiction debut that will appeal to fans of Miranda July’s All Fours.”

In her own words, here is Bonnie Friedman’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Don’t Stop:

Goldfinger (Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings)

Don’t Stop is a novel about a woman with an utterly divided life, who tells herself that part of it is real and important (the part with her kind husband and good job) and the other, which encompasses an increasingly dark sexual affair, is make-believe. And yet she is increasingly enthralled by the make-believe part, the part that she can’t allow herself to understand is real, even though she is taking more and more risks and discovering that what happens in the bedroom has repercussions for the entire rest of her life.

The novel begins in 1999, and Ina is sitting with her friend Janie on the Brooklyn Promenade, across from Wall Street. There’s an absolute euphoria in the city because the stock market is soaring and, unlike today, everyone seems to benefit, not just The Masters of the Universe. An atmosphere of recklessness pervades the city, and a sense that the old rules of reality might no longer apply. I chose Goldfinger from the soundtrack of The Wolf of Wall Street because I love its big louche horns and almost tawdry clamor. The song originated with the James Bond movies, which had a panache to them, a certain sardonic bordello swank just a step away from the overripe. As it happens, it is a song of warning.

Maria (Blondie)

Ina is a scholar is on a tight deadline to complete her academic book in order to keep her job, but nevertheless allows herself to be persuaded to go to a networking meeting at a bar. It’s a foggy night and she steps into this loud, throbbing, bewildering place that to her is something like the go-go party of hipsters featured in Laugh-In, a million years ago. She hates it. Something is thumping on the sound system. I chose a song I very much like, Maria, by Blondie, which was a power pop single that year. It’s about romantic obsession. Debbie Harry keeps sounding like she’s going to break into “The Tide Is High” with that sultry expansive lower register. It’s deeply hooky, this tune, with fantastic pounding drums that want to make your blood jump, and that do make Ina’s blood jump, despite herself.

It Might As Well Be Spring (Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz)

Could there be a cooler delivery that Gilberto’s? Perhaps Chet Baker’s on horn. Ina finds herself playing this song on repeat during the afternoon when she’s anticipating her first date. Gilberto sings it with her characteristic trance-y sangfroid. Delivered in a monotone and played over and over, the song is thrillingly hypnotic as it asks the question, “Why do I have spring fever / when I know it isn’t spring?” In fact, winter is coming to New York but something in Ina seems to be taking on a life of its own. “I’m starry-eyed and vaguely discontented.” “I feel so gay in a melancholy way that it might as well be spring.” Gorgeous Hammerstein lyrics set to Rogers’ insistent, driven melody about this delicious, fixated, in-between state.

I Saw the Light (Earl Scruggs)

Ina’s husband is the extremely decent, Texas-born Simon, who grew up in a fundamentalist family, and is an ace banjo player. This character was marvelously satisfying to write. I could very much imagine him playing Earl Scruggs’ version of I Saw the Light. It’s an upbeat, radiant bluegrass gospel number that reflects some of Simon’s own warm spirits and humane faith, being outward looking and open-hearted. Ina views Simon’s goodness as being somewhat childlike and simple, a limitation for which the reader knows she may pay.

Moon River (Elton John)

My mother, in her late nineties, isolated in her tiny apartment during COVID, used to sing this song with me over the telephone, only she sang “two sisters” instead of “two drifters”. Two sisters, off to see the world. In fact, she never had a sister, although she always wanted one. She had grown up in a family of boys. “Moon River” is a song all about longing and inner voices impelling one to a fateful rendezvous. Ina and Simon hold tight to one another as they dance around their living room to this tune, which Ina notices is a waltz. Elton John’s rendition, his foot heavy on the echo pedal, skirts the sentimentality that the song risks while letting us feel all the yearning.

Let’s Get It On (Marvin Gaye)

The vibe of Jack’s bedroom is summoned by this slow-burn Motown classic. I kept thinking that Barry White sang this song, as perhaps he should have at some time, with his melt-your knees bone-rumbling bass-baritone but no, this is Marvin Gaye’s slow-jam ballad, with his swoony bass and shouting tenor urging you to unstring yourself, to deliver yourself over. It’s impossible for me to hear this song without feeling the lights turn low and the heat turned up. An anthem for eroticism.

Dreams (The Cranberries)

Ina’s sister is a prickly, forbidding, domineering presence who has a difficult life, having been stricken with multiple sclerosis. She always makes Ina feel like two cents. In the background, while sister Violet and Ina are cooking together at Violet’s claustrophobic house, this catchy song comes on the radio, a missive from a distant reality, the reality in which most normal people obliviously move, with its relatable experience of first love, ringing and up tempo, full of possibilities. Violet’s experience is the opposite – has she ever been in love? —  and yet she’s a force to contend with, one of the strongest characters in the book, with her superpower being an ability to meet life open-eyed, without recourse to fantasy.

Agnus Dei from Missa in Festis Apostolmin (Palestrina)

Under protest and ill-prepared, Ina is assigned a creative-writing class to teach, to fill in for a professor who’s gone AWOL. She doesn’t know how to teach this class, and is told that the students will teach her. She has often stepped past this teacher’s classroom and noticed strange behavior: the lights out and a candle burning, Renaissance music playing, the students silently bent over their desks as if taking dictation, each from a different source. This polyphonic sacred choral piece by Palestrina, performed a capella, evokes spiritual presences as if drawing them forth from the clerestory of a cathedral, the sopranos ringing with a pure tone, and, beneath them, the rolling-forth bases smooth as sheets of water sliding in at low tide. The meditative, unhurried air invites one’s own inner truths to manifest, which may be why the original creative-writing teacher liked it. It awakens something uncomfortable in Ina, who, especially at this point in her life, wants order and control. This classroom will bring her the opposite.

Every Time We Say Goodbye (Annie Lennox)

Late in the novel, Simon and Ina dress up to hear a favorite performer of theirs, who sings in a Frank Sinatra style. This Cole Porter ballad, with its wry “how strange the change from major to minor” captures some of the beauty of the American songbook classics that allow an expansion of feeling within a contained few bars. Ina, at the end of the novel, will go with one man or the other (or neither) — and there will have to be a goodbye. My friend John Kane used to play this number at the end of a Friday evening when he lived in Milton, Massachusetts, and I’d come over to visit him and Gary, and would eat his magnificent roasted chicken and braised leeks, and drink Australian Savignon Blanc, and eat the real-vanilla-bean ice cream I’d brought. He’d step out into the snow if it was winter, and walk me to my car in his rolled-up white shirtsleeves and pressed gray office slacks, and say, “Safe home!” waving as I left. Some people when they say goodbye give you a present of their love to carry you toward home. Some people, even as they pass from this life, do the same thing. I think of John Kane when I hear this song, saying “Safe home!” and recall the love that stays even after the person is gone, and is never taken away.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Bonnie Friedman is the author of the bestselling Writing Past Dark, named one of the Essential Books for Writers by the Center for Fiction and Poets & Writers. She is also the author of The Thief of Happiness and Surrendering Oz, a finalist for the PEN Award in the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares and numerous other literary journals, and she has been named a notable essayist four times in The Best American Essays. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Dartmouth, NYU, and the University of North Texas. Don’t Stop is her first novel.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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.

Anna Dorn’s novel American Spirits is smart and entertaining and filled with characters that will haunt you long after finishing the book.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“The music writing in this book is outstanding, including intriguing real-world references and annotated playlists that will make you grateful for your streaming service. Dorn has a profound understanding of the relationship between an artist and her work . . . Nuanced characters, lively writing, and a heaping helping of bad behavior make the pages fly.”

In her own words, here is Anna Dorn’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel American Spirits:

I am so happy to be making my fifth Largehearted Boy playlist! I was looking back at old playlists to make sure I don’t have any repeats, because I have a tendency to listen to the same five songs over and over (and there is one repeat on this list, sorry). But more importantly, I found this description below Lana Del Rey’s “Old Money” in my Vagablonde playlist: “This is perhaps a cocky thing to say but I’ve always related to Lana as a sad East Coast girl who adopted California as her home state. This track embodies that sense of Southern California Gothic I’ve always wanted my writing to capture.” This sentiment remains true, and in fact American Spirits is directly inspired by Lana Del Rey. I see my first novel Vagablonde as a younger sister to American Spirits, as both books are music-obsessed and about star musicians. Vagablonde is messier, rawer, and features an aspiring musician; American Spirits is more mature, more polished, and stars a very famous musician. Vagablonde contains a lot of music writing—fake Pitchfork reviews, academic theses, gushing fan analyses, and I loved every second of writing it. I think most artists fantasize about being another type of artist. Lana Del Rey is a musician who wants to be a poet. And I’m a novelist who wants to be a musician. This is obvious from all my books but this one in particular. Here are some of the songs that inspired the music-drenched American Spirits. 

“Shades of Cool” – Lana Del Rey

“My baby lives in shades of blue. Blue eyes and jazz and attitude.” This is the first epigraph in American Spirits. I named the main character Blue Velour in part inspired by Lana’s obsession with blue—the word appears in 43 of her released songs—and also the fact that she covered “Blue Velvet” on Born to Die (Blue Velour is the trashier version). In Lana’s music, the word blue symbolizes melancholy, darkness, jazz, the ocean, and eventually triumph—moving, as she puts it on Lust For Life, “out of the black, into the blue.” I think my heroine makes a similar progression from black to blue. 

“Back to Black”- Amy Winehouse

“You go back to her, and I go back to us” is another epigraph in this novel and one of the most heartbreaking lines of music ever delivered. As in all my novels, there are many love triangles in this one, lots of going back to her and going back to us. Amy is a precursor to Lana Del Rey in her poetic excavation of doomed romance, and a member of the 27 Club, which Blue Velour takes great lengths to avoid joining. Lana goes to the blue, but Amy keeps going back to black.

“Unusual You” – Britney Spears

Spoiler alert: the superfan character in this book goes viral for covering this extremely underrated Britney Spears song. Vulnerable admission: I am a late-in-life Britney fan. When I was younger, I avoided her mostly due to contrarianism. But then “Unusual You” came on a playlist a few years ago, and something about this peculiar electropop ballad converted me. “Didn’t anyone tell you you’re supposed to break my heart?” is another epigraph in the book. And I’ve now listened to every song Brit has ever recorded.

“American Spirits” – Cassandra Jenkins 

I stole the title of my last novel Perfume & Pain from an out-of-print lesbian pulp novel. I stole the title for this novel—I’m admitting this here for the very first time—from this lush, aching Cassandra Jenkins song inspired by “the poetic ambiguity that can arise from the struggle of searching for the words to tell someone we love exactly what has happened.” And isn’t that what all novels are about? 

“Percocet & Stripper Joint” – Future 

I warned you there was a repeat track, and of course it’s a Future one. American Spirits is an older sister to Vagablonde, so it only makes sense they share a track. In Vagablonde, this track spoke to the main character’s druggy dissociation. In American Spirits, it’s what I imagine the production of Blue Velour’s pandemic album Mood Onyx to sound like: droning 808s, gothic synths, negative space swallowing everything. 

“Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” – Nancy Sinatra

In the novel, Blue Velour’s first album is called Spirit of Sinatra as an ode to Nancy. I am not the first to make the Nancy Sinatra–Lana Del Rey connection: both wear their daddy issues on their sleeves and make love sound spooky as hell (cue “White Feather Hawk Deer Tail Hunter”). “Bang Bang” is a song about being shot dead that somehow feels like a dream. I kind of wanted this novel to feel like that, too.

“Love Buzz” – Nirvana 

In the novel, Blue Velour first captures the attention of her longtime producer by covering “Love Buzz.” The two of them later use lyrics from the song to title a future album. Lana is a huge fan of Kurt Cobain, another member of the 27 Club, and Blue Velour is too. “Love Buzz” happens to be my favorite Nirvana song as well—quelle surprise given I wrote the book!

“Mirrorball” – Taylor Swift 

Another confession: I’m a late-in-life Taylor Swift fan. I was listening to her a lot when I was writing this book, and the Folklore cabin inspired my decision to have Blue Velour make a pandemic album while holed up in the redwoods—although it sounds less like Folklore and more like Dirty Sprite 2. Blue Velour despises Taylor Swift, but her producer secretly likes her. “Mirrorball” captures how Taylor can be whatever people need her to be, and Blue needs a foil.

“Blue Motel Room” – Joni Mitchell

Like Lana Del Rey, Joni Mitchell is obsessed with the color blue. Beyond her most beloved album, Blue, the color is also in a great number of her song titles, like this blue-toned jazz track from the critical darling Hejira. She wrote most of the album while driving across the U.S. in the mid-70s, reminiscent of Blue Velour’s manic drive across the country in American Spirits. Missing her lover in L.A. on a stop in Georgia, Joni has blue on her mind: “I’ve got a blue motel room / With a blue bedspread / I’ve got the blues inside and outside my head / Will you still love me / When I get back to town?”

also at Largehearted Boy:

Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Perfume and Pain

Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Exalted

Anna Dorn’s playlist for her memoir Bad Lawyer

Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Vagablonde

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Anna Dorn is the author of the novels Perfume and Pain, Exalted, Vagablonde, and American Spirits. She was a Lambda Literary Fellow and Exalted was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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.

Eric LeMay’s essay collection The First 649 Days offers breathtaking perspectives on love and loss.

Dinty W. Moore wrote of the book:

“Eric LeMay’s The First 649 Days is a work of breathtaking honesty and heart. LeMay captures life’s singular moments—the birth of a child, unexpected illness, mortality—exquisitely, revealing the precarious beauty of our world through the eyes of his young son Ro. LeMay’s inventive renderings are a brilliant reminder that our lives may harbor threat, disappointment, and grief, yet still shimmer with hope and wild beauty at every turn.”

In his own words, here is Eric LeMay’s Book Notes music playlist for his essay collection The First 649 Days:

“You’re about to get hit by a hurricane.” That’s the best advice I got about what it’s like when a baby makes landfall in your life. The First 649 Days begins there. It ends five years later, with the 649 days I spent with my son during the pandemic. In between, it tries to capture that everyday struggle we all confront: How do we become what life makes of us?  

“Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, CeeLo Green, Danger Mouse

In the dead of winter, still in the womb, my son went from due to overdue. He had no interest in exiting. And who could blame him?  Day after day, his mother tried to dance him down the birth canal with “Crazy.” That’s how we felt, playing it again and again. When my son was old enough to talk, I played it for him. Did he remember? Nope.

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” by Baby Music

For the first years of my son’s life, this little twinkling star was the one constant in his ever-changing bedtime. He had no interest in sleeping. And who could blame him? As he got older, he sang along with us. I don’t remember when we stopped, but I do remember, toward the end, realizing that each time we sang it might be the last, and how hard I loved him.

“Further on Up the Road” by Johnny Cash

Our first singalong. We’d go on long walks. He’d be in this backpack I wore that held him up on my shoulders. I’d sing, “Where the road is…” And he’d sing, “Dark.” And I’d sing, “And the seed is…” And he’d sing, “Sowed.” “Where the gun is…” “Cocked.” “As the bullet’s…” “Cold.” Where the miles are marked in the blood and the gold. I’ll meet you further on up the road.

“Demon Host” by Timbre Timbre

I got cancer when my son was a little over a year old. I can’t capture that in a note. I can say I felt so devastated, so distraught, I couldn’t write. And then one night I started to. I’d kiss my son on the forehead and drag myself out of our bed and into the dark. I’d listen to this song, over and over, until I could write a sentence or two about what it was like knowing I might not live.

“Metamorphosis: One” by Philip Glass

Life with a young child cycles. Every day feels like a repetition of the last one. Meals, naps, walks, baths, repeat, repeat. There’s a deep beauty to it, being on child time. The small variations magnify. Suddenly, avocados are in. Suddenly, he can say the cat’s name. “Sailor! Sailor!” I felt and feel a little of this magic in Glass’s cascading and beautiful loops.

“Ring Around the Rosie” by Toddler Tunes

And then came the pandemic, with its own repetitions, with its isolation and mass death. And amid it all, children like mine went about the work of growing up. It was then I learned the lore around “Ring Around the Rosie.” That its origins are in the bubonic plague. That a red ring was a sign of infection. That people carried posies to mask the stench of death. That all fall down.

“Roll the Woodpile Down” by The Dreadnaughts

In lockdown, sea shanties started trending. My son and I learned this one before I’d quite figured out what its lyrics described. By then, it was too late to be a good parent. Instead, I just enjoyed the oddity of a four-year-old belting out a love for 19th-century prostitutes and the bawdy ways of sailors. I played it for him this morning. “I do remember it,” he said. I do, too.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Eric LeMay is a multimedia artist and writer currently in remission from cancer. He is on the faculty at Ohio University, where he directs the creative writing program. He is also a host on the New Books Network. He is the author of five books, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, the Best Food Writing series, and other venues.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

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.

Written in the form of a headache journal, Zach Powers’s The Migraine Diaries is both inventive and profound in its exploration of pain and endurance.

The Brooklyn Rail wrote of the book:

“Powers understands the instant obliteration of a headache and, brilliantly, juxtaposes that with the loss of a friend. Should someone ever take up [Virginia] Woolf’s challenge and assemble a literary anthology of maladies, they should look first to Powers for his descriptions of the headache.”

In her own words, here is Zach Powers’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Migraine Diaries:

I do most of my writing in coffee shops, so my playlists are often selected by baristas. Right now, at Simona Cafe in Bethesda, Maryland, I have no idea what song is playing. And that’s alright by me. When I focus, the music, the chatter, and the hissing gurgle of the espresso machine all blur into an ambient background. If I’m sitting with someone, and they point out the song on the radio, I have to dredge my attention up from deep inside me before I’m aware of any sound at all.

My novel The Migraine Diaries opens as the narrator experiences his first migraine at the funeral for his best friend, KJ, and follows the narrator’s life as he navigates grief and chronic illness. A number of scenes take place in a coffee shop, a slightly fictionalized version of Gallery Espresso in Savannah, Georgia, where I wrote and/or hung out almost every day for 15 years. Despite the word “diaries” in the book’s title, let me emphasize that this is fiction. Though the narrator, like me, is a migraine sufferer who spends a lot of time in coffee shops, my default move is always to take a step away from myself when I feel things getting too autobiographical. Though there are other real settings and fictionalized versions of real experiences, none of the characters are based on single individuals. Which leads me back to the character KJ.

In 2009, one of my oldest friends, Kirk, died after enduring a brain tumor for several years. A few months later, my closest friend at the time, Jeremy, died tragically. The character KJ is neither of these friends and also sorta both of them. I mention Kirk and Jeremy here because in the absence of any specific playlist I had while writing the novel, for the playlist assembled below, I tried to think of songs that somehow existed in and around my life as I remembered and as I wrote. These are songs I associate with the friends and places that inspired my writing. And, hopefully, all arranged into a half-decent mix.

“Till My Head Falls Off” by They Might Be Giants

This was the first song to pop into my head when I started thinking about my playlist. The central pivot point of The Migraine Diaries involves ibuprofen, and these lyrics open with an Advil reference. The song’s title, of course, has obvious relevance, too. More personally, TMBG is my most-played band. In high school, I had a TMBG mixtape I made a copy of for Kirk, which I’ve previously written about in the only personal essay I’ve maybe ever published.

“So Fresh, So Clean” by OutKast

Sticking with Kirk, our friendship was maintained through the early days of the internet and the messaging platforms ICQ and AIM. One of those (maybe both?) allowed you to turn on an away message when you were, well, away from your computer. One of Kirk’s regular away messages—I have always assumed it to be for when he was taking a shower, though I never confirmed this—was, simply, “So fresh, so clean.” Bonus here for Big Boi being from Savannah.

“Purple Rain” by Prince

In 2007, Prince performed the Super Bowl XLI halftime show. For those unfamiliar, it is perhaps the greatest live performance in the history of the universe. Rain threatened the whole thing, but in the moment, it seemed more likely that Prince himself had summoned the rain. We were at my friend Chris’s house (see more on Chris below) for a Super Bowl party. Jeremy, who cared nothing for football but loved Prince absolutely, watched the halftime show standing a few feet from the TV. At one point, Chris and I glanced over, and tears were just freefalling down Jeremy’s face. In retrospect, that seems like the only right reaction.

“Peek‐A‐Boo” by Siouxsie and the Banshees

In the novel, there’s a character named Chris who works at my fictional Gallery Espresso. One of my best friends, Christopher Berinato, is manager of the real Gallery. He also happens to be a music journalist, so you can always tell when he’s working because the shop’s playlist will be on point. I asked him to pick a song to include, and this is it! He reminded me of the story of when he first heard this song when he was 12: “MTV was always on, but I was into Van Halen and Bon Jovi. When I watched that video, as I stood in the middle of the room, it immediately rewired my brain.”

“Rainfall” by Apples in Stereo

The Gallery Espresso in my novel is based on its current location, but Gallery used to be around the corner in a different location, where I first met Jeremy and Chris. At the old location, a barista played this album literally every time he worked. When he moved away, I found myself missing the album, and it became a regular in my listening rotation. Bonus: the old Gallery location is now home to The Book Lady Bookstore, where they’ve been absurdly supportive of every literary thing I’ve ever done.

“GO!!!” by Flow

The anime Naruto has a prominent place in the novel, and an even more prominent place in my real life. Kirk introduced the show to me back when you had to download the fan-subtitled torrents a few days after the Japanese release of each episode. Since then I’ve consumed more hours of Naruto than any other creative work. Me, Chris, and two other writer friends, Killsey and Gino, all watched and shared weekly recaps. For the playlist, it was a tossup whether to include “GO!!!,” the show’s fourth opening theme song, or “Wind” by Akeboshi, from the original closing credits. This one pumps me up, so it got the nod. Fighting dreamers!

“Modern Romance” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I spent my youth and young adulthood studying jazz, so I reached my mid-twenties with limited knowledge of other genres. One of my first returns to rock was this album that Jeremy lent me on CD, which I listened to so much that he let me keep it. I digitized and got rid of almost all my CDs years ago, but I still have this one.

“Heroin” by  The Velvet Underground & Nico

When I have a long writing project, I choose a few books to be my daily warmup reading. The warmup might be a whole chapter or story, but sometimes just a few sentences. For The Migraine Diaries, one of my warmup books was Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which takes its title from this song. I lent my original copy of Jesus’ Son to a friend who never returned it, but I don’t remember which friend. I hope they’re enjoying their thievery.

“Meticulous Bird” by Thao & the Get Down Stay Down

While I was writing the first draft of the novel, I was introduced to Thao by my writer pal Thaddeus Gunn. I listened to this album on repeat, and Thao became a shared favorite for me and my partner, Stephanie. Bonus: Thao is from Northern Virginia, close to where I now live, and has her own book coming out, which I’m super excited for.

“Self Portrait in Three Colors” by Charles Mingus

Somewhere in the early planning for this novel, I had the thought, I wonder if I could write a book that works like “Self Portrait in Three Colors.” The song repeats its form three times, each time adding a new melodic line, so in the third iteration there’s this perfect three-part polyphony. My novel focuses on the three main surviving friends. What might each of their melodies be, and how might the melodies interact? Now, I don’t think I really followed through on that initial thought, but I do think it influenced the braiding of the novel’s sections. At least I hope so!

“Hallelujah” by The Helio Sequence

The first thing I ever published was a paragraph-long review of this album for a print publication I can no longer remember the name of. I got the gig through Kirk, who knew the editor. I don’t think it was particularly good or insightful writing, but it introduced me to this song, which I still listen to, and I find the lyrics to be an excellent thematic fit for The Migraine Diaries.

“The End of the Tour” by They Might Be Giants

I mentioned making high school mix tapes, and I tried to use this as the last song on most of the mix tapes I made. I feel a sense of melancholy here, but when the electric guitar kicks in, I always air-strum along. One time after a long road trip, I pulled into my parking spot exactly as this song ended. I can hear my characters listening to it in the car in the novel’s final scene. “And we’re never gonna tour again. No, we’re never gonna tour again…”

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Zach Powers is the author of the novel The Migraine Diaries (JackLeg 2026), the novel First Cosmic Velocity, and the story collection Gravity Changes, winner of the Boa Short Fiction Prize. His writing has been featured by American Short Fiction, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. He serves as Executive & Artistic Director for The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, he now lives in Arlington, Virginia.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.