Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Radhika Singh’s debut novel Earthly Playing Field is a thought-provoking work of speculative fiction.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“A complex coming-of-political-consciousness narrative . . . heady and fascinating . . . it’s obvious Singh knows her stuff. There’s much to chew on here.””

In her own words, here is Radhika Singh’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Earthly Playing Field:

My debut, Earthly Playing Field (Common Notions Press, May, 2026), is closely followed by the first novel I actually wrote, Weirdly Tuned Antennae (FC2 Press, November 2026)—because life, like art, is a little bit sci fi! Below is a playlist for both novels.

Prince’s final concert ~ Piano & A Microphone tour, 2016

I started drafting my first novel, Weirdly Tuned Antennae, in the fall of 2016. Prince had left Planet Earth that April, and I’d passed the months playing on loop two bootleg copies of his final shows in Atlanta. I’m not alone in considering him an original, a genius, a glittering cosmic flame. I was deeply moved by the fact of his existence and really shook by his premature departure. His final performances are a meditative rumination on a juicy, bursting pop oeuvre… the philosophical confrontation of a man with his original instrument. They subsumed my writerly consciousness and even the writing itself; a literal impression is included in the novel.

Ani Difranco’s cover of When You Were Mine, by Prince

I’ve loved Prince since childhood (my first ever ‘real’ concert was during his Diamonds and Pearls tour), but my teenage heart belonged to Ani. I memorized each word and chord she strummed on stages I never saw, via bootleg cassettes with handwritten track lists exchanged through networks of ardent followers. I learned the principles of poetry by studying her rhymes. She’d left my rotation by my early 20s, and then I found this cover while roaming Prince’s archives after his death. It was surreal to hear her give voice to his lyrics—both so indelibly familiar to me—as I composed my own work.

Arooj Aftab ~ Siren Islands

Weirdly Tuned Antennae is set during the monsoon in the foothills of the Himalayas, where I was living at the time, in a big old wooden house with amazing acoustics. I played a lot of ambient music, like Tibetan singing bowls and throat singing, that would reverberate off the walls and saturate the space. One of the albums I listened to on repeat was Siren Islands by Arooj Aftab. The subdued, dreamy soundscape echoed the mist and rain that perpetually enclosed the house and the hillside, veiling the big mountains otherwise visible from my doorstep. This atmospheric quality is palpable throughout the pages.

Begum Akhtar’s Na Ja Balam Pardes in Gitanjali Rao’s Printed Rainbow

The romance of the Islamic Golden Age endures in the Punjabi / North Indian imagination, through archetypal films like Pakeezah and Mughal-e-Azam and classical Hindustani raags expressing epic themes of divine love. This sense of enchantment is instinctual to me; I’m a sucker for grainy old recordings that feel like they’re reaching through time. Both my novels reflect this core nostalgia. Rather than choosing a specific ghazal or thumri, I’m sharing here a scene I carry with me from Gitanjali Rao’s beautiful animation, Printed Rainbow: a vision of sensuality set to Begum Akhtar’s rendition of Na Ja Balam Pardes. The clip is cued to the opening chords. 

Tumhein Dillagi Bhool Jani Padegi ~ Nustrat Fateh Ali Khan

My second novel, Earthly Playing Field, is at heart a Sufi love story. It was a joy to research Sufi poetry and philosophy, and the movement of Sufi orders to North India. Qawwali originated in 13th century Hindustan—devotional music that mirrored contemporary Bhakti traditions and built on the Sufi practice of sama, or deep listening. The ‘father’ of the form, Amir Khusrau, is of special relevance to Delhi-ites like me as his gravesite is located in the center of the city next to that of his beloved, the Chishti Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. Khusrau blended regional vernaculars and cultural references with courtly Persian and Arabic tongues to produce a uniquely desi syncretism immortalized by masters like the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. In the end, however, the qawwali I played most while writing this book is not actually by Khusrau!

Gurbani Kirtan

The real soundtrack to my second novel is Gurbani—the verses of the Sikh holy book set to music. The faith was founded in 15th century Punjab by Guru Nanak, who wandered the lands (all the way to Mecca!) with his companion Bhai Mardana, spreading his teachings of Oneness of Being through gentle song. Bhai Mardana played a stringed instrument called the rabab; nowadays, the accompaniment is more often on tabla and harmonium. Like the Sufi philosophy that inspires the Sikh faith, Gurbani instructs the seeker to surpass the ego and embrace a greater sense of Self. On a revolutionary level, it calls for us to balance the responsibilities of material reality, including the defense of justice, with a total and simultaneous submission to a more transcendent sense of truth. The wisdom of Gurbani forms the ethos of the novel (and of the title – Earthly Playing Field). 

Surah Yaseen ~ The Quran

One of the central concerns of Earthly Playing Field is the role of faith in resistance. How does a people besieged by relentless onslaught from a materially powerful oppressor maintain the struggle for sovereignty with such dignity—day after day, year after year, generation after generation? Motivated by my own desperate need to understand a truth greater than myself, I started keeping the Ramadan fast in 2024. I found I wasn’t the only non-Muslim showing up to iftars, wracked by similar questions. That first year of fasting was a real trip, in the trippiest sense. I meditated a lot and listened to many hours-long recordings of mesmerizing Surahs while writing prose that reflected my journey—both physical and metaphysical. This recitation of Surah Yasin is one I return to often.  

Chungking Express ~ California Dreamin’

There are songs that hum through us all the time—perhaps because we are, at base, vibrational beings. I wanted to end this list with one of those, but there are so many to choose from! There’s this one called The Moon (Swell Season) that’s always in my head, and Billie Holiday’s All of Me. And there’s Unravel by Björk, a forever beloved whose politic thankfully stands up in genocidal times. I decided on California Dreamin’ because for me the association is with Wong Kar Wai, whose aesthetic was so personally formative and who put Asia on the map of arthouse film back in ’90s USA. Today, as the sun sets over the Western Empire, the notion of California Dreaming feels like even more of a throwback.

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

Radhika Singh is a writer and editor living in Queens, New York. Her fiction speculates on the presence of magic in this world, the connection to spirit and consciousness, and the power of the people to organize for collective liberation. Her novel Weirdly Tuned Antennae, winner of the 2025 Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest, is forthcoming from FC2 Press; an excerpt was featured in the 2024 Genre issue of The Markaz Review. Her comic Leila Khaled & the Struggle for Liberation, created in collaboration with illustrator Samita Chatterjee, appeared in the 2024 Trade/ Trade Off issue of Comixense magazine. For more information visit: rhsingh.work.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Truong Tran’s memoir How to Exi(s)t is brilliantly inventive in form and powerfully told.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Vietnamese American poet and visual artist Tran (Book of the Other) examines racism, queer history, and his own life in this striking nonlinear account.”

In his own words, here is Truong Tran’s Book Notes music playlist for his memoir How to Exi(s)t:

This playlist is unusual in that I do not consider myself a connoisseur of music. I listen to music in a way that feels very utilitarian. I look for music that helps me do the work of excavating memories. And as such, these are the songs I listened to, for the most part on repeat, while writing this book.

They aren’t songs that I am claiming as my favorite songs, nor do I think of them as the best songs in a lifetime of songs. But they are songs that guided me through the journey of this book. I listened to them while walking the length of Golden Gate Park. I listened to them while writing late at night, allowing these songs to guide me toward sleep. And I listened to them before the rest of the world woke the next morning, as a way of helping me find my bearings.

1. Pulp — “Common People”

I remember hearing “Common People” when I was in my twenties and being struck by the fact that this white guy from England had somehow found his way into my head. How was it that someone whose life seemed so different from mine could articulate something I understood so deeply about class and the working person? There was something in the song that spoke clearly to the way I saw the world.

I find myself thinking about class right now and how we tuck so much into the framework of class. We hide our racism in class. We hide our biases in class. And somehow we have arrived at an understanding that class, class structure, and being classist are entirely acceptable. I think this song speaks to that moment of consideration. It asks us to look at what we mean when we talk about class and what else might be hiding inside of it. It is worth unpacking.

2. Diana Ross — “Do You Know Where You’re Going To (Theme from Mahogany)”

I can say that this was the first song I listened to that guided me toward my identification as queer. I remember watching Diana Ross in the film and thinking that I identified with her quest for identity and her arrival as a fashion designer in Paris. I was probably eight years old. I knew nothing about fashion, but I saw myself in her.

In particular, I remember the moment when she put on one of her designs and twirled in what I can only describe as a moment of ecstatic joy. I wanted to be that person. I look back on it now and think to myself: this was my queer awakening.

3. Linda Ronstadt — “Long Long Time”

“Long Long Time” is a song that speaks to the breakup of a longtime love, a way of saying goodbye. For me, that breakup was not with a person, but with a practice: the writing of poetry. My road as a poet has been filled with complications: a desire to be accepted as a poet, the rejection by other poets, and ultimately the understanding that poetry was not enough.

In that way, Ronstadt’s song and its lyrics spoke to the many levels of my love for poetry. But it also spoke to my desire to move forward, toward something that poetry as a container could no longer hold. And to be honest, I wanted to put down the burden that had been placed on me all these years, that notion that “Truong is a nice guy, but he’s just a poet.” This is the weight of someone else’s shame. It is a weight that I am no longer willing to carry.

4. Family of the Year — “Hero”

This song was introduced to me by a student, and I remember how immediately I connected with the lyrics. I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to fight like everyone else. There is something about the honesty of that sentiment that stuck with me and reminded me of the numerous occasions when readers of my work have told me that they admire my courage and my bravery.

And I do appreciate that. But I also remember the conflict that came with receiving such a statement. Why should we have to be brave or courageous to say what is true? It is a God-given right. It is no different than breathing. Why is it so hard to own the truth? And as such, why are we so afraid?

5. Nina Simone — “Feeling Good”

Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” is an anthem. It is the song that I have always wanted playing in the back of my head as I move forward and put the weight of someone else’s shame behind me. I know I keep going back to that sentiment, but the truth is, when racism happens to you, when discrimination happens, or when you have been wronged, somehow you not only absorb the impact of that punch, but you wear the bruises.

Nina Simone’s song speaks of a new beginning. It speaks of moving forward. I envision myself strutting as the song is playing. I envision myself saying out loud, “Fuck all that noise.” I envision myself coming out of silence and existing in the world.

6. Peter Gabriel — “The Book of Love”

Peter Gabriel’s “The Book of Love” is remarkable to me because I can hear the aging of his voice in the rendering of those lyrics. I hear a voice that has lived, and in doing so, I begin to hear my own voice in How to Exi(s)t. I can hear the aging of my voice in this book.

It is not the voice of the young writer who wanted to be accepted as a poet. This is the voice of the old man who is looking for the things he lost along the way. I think that all writing is the act of losing something and wanting to find it. At 57 years of age, this takes on an urgency that I want to honor now more than ever.

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

Truong Tran is a poet, visual artist, and teacher born in Saigon, Vietnam. His books include Book of the Other: Small in Comparison, winner of the American Book Award, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words, 100 words, Looking and Seeing/Seeing and Looking, the children’s book Going Home Coming Home, and an artist monograph, I Meant To Say Please Past the Sugar. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant, and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Truong is also a visual artist who believes that art, be it poetry, cooking, sculpting, or even gardening, is his way of thinking through the conscience of the times we live in. Truong teaches at Northeastern University, Oakland and lives in San Francisco.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Kathleen Furin’s collection The Loneliness of Glass is filled with captivating stories of women on the edge.

Christine Sneed wrote of the book:

“Arrestingly vivid. . . . Furin’s stories pulse with bewitching vitality.”

In her own words, here is Kathleen Furin’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection The Loneliness of Glass:

The Loneliness of Glass is a short story collection, so it makes sense to offer a song for each story. This collection focuses on women on the borders living messy lives and navigating issues around trauma, oppression, and identity. The theme of loneliness threads these stories together — many of my characters feel alone even when they are surrounded by other people. Sometimes this loneliness arises from a desire for self-preservation, sometimes it stems from situations which arise out of navigating oppressive systems, and sometimes it develops as a result of the character’s own flaws. These stories were created over the course of many years, some of them starting as snippets of ideas based on events and issues happening in the world and some of them inspired by creative writing prompts. Each song is intended to reflect some element of the story with which it is paired. The order of songs here aligns with the arrangement of the stories in the book, which may feel a bit discordant for listeners; this discordance, however, is also a reflection of the spaces of discomfort my characters inhabit.

“Drunkard’s Prayer” by Over the Rhine

The opening story, “Animal Control,” is heavy, so I wanted to pick a song that was mournful and brooding. This song is about the type of relationship that truly nourishes someone, which is exactly what the protagonist in the story, Emma, is lacking. Emma wants the type of comfort offered by this song, but she will not allow herself to access it. She punishes herself by living within the rules, accepting the rigidity of harmful systems and her family’s inherited (and erroneous) understanding of how to be in the world. Her little sister Pom is more authentic and courageous — but Emma’s reaction to Pom’s authenticity is the thing that ends up destroying her.

Emma is a character who has absolutely every reason under the sun to reject supremacist systems. She personally suffers from her allegiances to racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity, but she lacks the ability and will to reject these damaging systems. The tragedy of her story is not just the harm she causes but also the fact that she will probably never fully accept herself or challenge the things outside of herself that need to be challenged — and therefore she will never heal, because the things that are wrong in the world are not just outside of her, but also within her. 

“Baile Inolvidable” by Bad Bunny

For me this song speaks to connections in a relationship which are deep and true, even though the relationship may not last. In the story “Unit 51” my character Janey experiences this type of passionate chemistry, but in order to nurture this connection she must sacrifice her relationship with her mother, who is strongly opposed to her being in a relationship with a Black man. Having been in an interracial relationship for almost 35 years I think a lot about people’s expectations and assumptions about people in interracial relationships, as well as what some of us sacrifice to be with the people we truly love. What are these types of systems we live in that make us choose one type of love, one human relationship, over another? When you look at things systemically you can just see how wrong that way of thinking is, but it is still way too prevalent. Often chemistry or physical passion is what drives the initiation of relationships, interracial or otherwise. I don’t think passion can hold relationships together, but that kind of crazy chemistry can dissolve a lot of barriers, at least at first. Janey succumbs to the thrill of the “unforgettable dance” but by the end of the story she is unsure about whether she can actually sustain what this relationship is asking of her.

“Journalistes en Danger” by Alpha Blondy

This song accompanies the story “Sanctuary,” which focuses on April, a woman who volunteers at a program for recently arrived refugees. In his music Alpha Blondy, an artist from Côte d’Ivoire, grapples with political and social issues similar to those April is concerned with. April makes an earnest effort to try to do something to help people, but gets caught up in the messiness of being human and realizes how inadequate her efforts are. Many of Alpha Blondy’s songs would work as a companion to this piece, but as the US slides further into fascism each day this song, about the assassination of Norbert Zongo and what it means to be a journalist expressing oneself outside the confines of “free” speech, speaks to our particular moment. Mainstream media has failed us miserably at this time in history. How do we hold onto our integrity and humanity in the face of so much hatred and brutality? What do we do when we are tested? Many of us in the US are failing. We can know deeply that things are wrong and yet still get distracted by the same things which distract April. Is there a way to turn this around and create new just and equitable systems? I think so, and I hope so. I see the new young leaders who are passionate and authentic and articulate about human rights — and still, I believe the USA will never truly thrive until it settles its karmic debts. We are up against evil, so we all need to get to work.

“One Day” by Matisyahu

The story “North Coast” is complex and layered. In some ways it is about the loss of innocence, but this is also one of the few stories in the book where the relationship between the couple is authentic and loving, so I paired it with this song, which feels to me like a reflection of a type of love that transcends supremacist systems, and offers possibilities for transformation.  

“Quisiera” by N’taya & Laen

There are some similarities between the couple in my story “Boy” and the couple in “Unit 51,” so I chose a similar type of song for “Boy”: one which also celebrates raw sexual energy and passion. The couple here have powerful chemistry which initially connects them, but then they don’t know what to do with it. Beth is unwilling to examine the ways in which she has been socialized into white supremacist culture and is ultimately unwilling to give up her allegiances to white supremacy, so she will never be able to successfully sustain an interracial connection. She fetishizes Alex, but when she seriously considers what it would mean for her to have children who don’t “look like her” she experiences a true crisis. This song is probably too upbeat and fun for this mess of a couple, but I think my point with this story is that attraction will only get you so far.

“Rebelion” by Joe Arroyo

At its heart the story “The Cookie Jar” is really about how white people have so much trouble giving up control of the narrative, even when we think we are doing the right thing. We are so poorly informed and ill-educated about history and colonialism and enslavement and what actually happened and how it actually looked. Yet most of us don’t want to admit to this ignorance, and much of the time we are not in a position where we have to examine it. I wasn’t thinking consciously about any of this when I wrote the story — it just poured through me — but when I reread it I was sort of laughing at this character who wants to “save” something by owning it, by making it hers. That is the phenomenon of cooptation in a nutshell, and white people (including myself) do this all the time, sometimes unintentionally or subconsciously, but harmfully, nonetheless. So Arroyo’s song, about the brutal absurdity of enslavement and people who have had enough, seems like an apt companion.

 “Dream Team” by Spearhead

This song is paired with “Gunnysack at the Smithsonian.” Again, the protagonist of this story is so ridiculous — the idea of a white woman feeling jealous of someone who was enslaved is ludicrous. But I observe white people wanting to appropriate Black ideas and Black culture all the time, and I think I was trying to say something about that. White people are drawn to what they perceive as “coolness” and talent and resilience and can so easily disconnect from the pain and the trauma and the ongoing impacts of history. I connect this song with this story because the song, with its roll call of historic freedom fighters, offers a more accurate representation of what a true “dream team” in the USA looks like. Leaders currently in charge want to eliminate “DEI” but the reality is that they themselves are utterly inadequate. They can try to control their narratives about a “master race,” but their incompetence is palpable.

“Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman

“Mountain Pose” is about the drudgery of work and what it takes for people working behind the scenes to create “magical” experiences for other people. When I think about situations like that, I think about “Fast Car,” which emphasizes the impact of oppressive systems and the difficulty of escaping those systems. I am interested in the hypocrisy of healing spaces which tend to put all the emphasis on healing the individual, and none of the emphasis on healing culture and society. You cannot escape systems which are meant to oppress you easily, and maybe it’s for this reason that many of us spend our time focused on individual rather than systemic change. This story is an attempt to explore some of these realities.

 “Little Girl Gone” by Chinchilla

The character in my story “Being Clarisse” does end up standing up to her antagonist, and I think she can relate to the raw rage and pain and unfairness about the ways men act within patriarchal systems in which rape and abuse are normalized, a rage which is expressed through this song. Women are exhausted by the brutality inflicted on us. The song, and hopefully the story, encapsulate this fury, along with ideas about what it means to fight back.

“Okra” by Olu Dara

For my story “Tomb of my Heart,” which is about a young girl’s struggle in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I wanted a song that was reminiscent of the beautiful, complicated culture of New Orleans. Olu Dara is from Natchez, not New Orleans, but I do think this song is reflective of elements of the culture I was trying to capture, including the sense of lineage, the way history lives in the present, combining mourning with joy, and of course, amazing food and music which are so strongly rooted in place.  

 “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac

The protagonist in “The Loneliness of Glass” is so weird, and the events she describes are so eerie — I needed a haunting song to go with this story, and “Rhiannon,” about a birdlike woman who is difficult to understand, let alone love, felt perfect. I am fascinated by characters who don’t want what women are “supposed” to want, who are not afraid of death, and Claudine is certainly one of these characters.

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

Kathleen Furin’s work has been published in American Literary Review, Coolest American Stories, So to Speak, Permafrost, Evanescent, Philadelphia Stories, Literary Mama, Mutha Magazine, and Midwifery Today, among others. She holds an MFA from New York University, and edits, consults, teaches, and writes, mostly in Philly.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Rebecca Birrell’s novel Venus, Vanishing is an encompassing and unsettling debut.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“The literary debut from art historian Birrell magnificently reimagines Jewish women’s artistic pursuits in 1930s Berlin and their world of bohemian individuality as they confront an oppressive regime that erases people, figuratively and literally. The prose, which is of high caliber, sensitively reveals the process of creation and poses questions about what artistic freedom truly means. Especially recommended for readers of Lisa Barr and Julie Orringer.”

In her own words, here is Rebecca Birrell’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Venus, Vanishing:

It feels shameful to admit that music isn’t important to my work. I have never listened to music while writing. I could explain this by arguing that visual art has always been at the forefront of my thinking, and perhaps because the mind has only finite space for creative inspiration— or so I have reasoned in the past—music has never been an equivalent touchstone. Another problem I might point to is that I intuitively share the art historical canon beloved by my protagonist, Hannah, a young Jewish seamstress aspiring to be a painter in the late twenties in Berlin. I imagine there are people out there regularly listening to thirties jazz and cabaret numbers, but I am not one of them. 

I expect, however, that the discomfort goes deeper than this. I remember being asked in my twenties what music I liked by people innocently attempting to get to know me and announcing in response: ‘I don’t listen to music.’ I didn’t mean this literally —what I meant was that I didn’t know how to provide an answer that would shed any light on my personality. Similarly, I worried I wouldn’t be able to make much meaningful sense of Venus, Vanishing this way. So, I went back to my Spotify Wrapped for the year I wrote the first messy draft of the novel, 2024. Well, that was enlightening—by which I mean, traumatising and very funny. I could see the shape of my own histrionics, and my attempts to overcome them, in the collection of songs about love and longing. Many of the songs I was listening to then had embarrassingly literal connections to what was going on in my personal life, which I kept as compartmentalised as possible, not wanting to let it encroach upon my writing. I won’t bore readers with the vast quantities of Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams I was blasting out my phone’s tinny speakers while I sat in my bedroom crying. These are mostly crossover songs that enriched the novel, but also helped me feel less insane about my own circumstances so I could muster the energy and wherewithal to write. 

1. Mitski, “Nobody”

When Hannah moves away from her family to a room of her own at the beginning of the novel, I wanted to convey something of the possibility and excitement that entails—as well as its occasionally melancholic aspect. I was living alone in a house on the edge of the city when I wrote the novel, so I knew this experience well, and had found solace in this song’s account of desire and loneliness. ‘My God I’m so lonely,’ Mitski sings, but her tone isn’t exactly unhappy—there’s pleasure in the confession, almost a pride in the self-sufficiency of her solitude, and this was something I hoped to convey in those early parts of the novel. 

2. Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love”

I tend to think of this as a song about emotional avoidance, something which is very relevant to Hannah in the novel, who finds herself lying about her relationship with her patron more and more to her lovers as time passes. Love involves responsibility and vulnerability and sometimes we don’t feel up to the challenge of that, would rather run from it, maintain our so-called autonomy—and I love the imagery Bush uses to express this: the wounded fox she can’t bear to hold as it dies. This will be a common theme in the playlist, but I also think of this song as being about creativity—feeling pursued, haunted, stirred, and the courage that’s required in allowing yourself to confront and inhabit that desire.

3. Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”

The letters of artists and writers in the early and mid-twentieth century were a significant source of inspiration for the novel. This a favourite example of a song with an epistolary format, one which really feels like a letter in parts: the remarkable scene-setting in the first verse; the oblique, private details—why is the blue raincoat ‘famous’? —that give a sense of a full, shifting, intersubjective world behind the writing. It also happens to touch on many of the novel’s themes: desire, betrayal, jealousy. 

4. Florence + the Machine, “Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up)”

Another song about ambition, and wondering whether you can adequately meet the magnitude of your fantasies and aspirations. ‘Will it ever be enough?’ Florence asks and answers herself immediately: ‘it’s not enough.’ I wanted Hannah’s relationship to her own creativity to feel like this: urgent, hungry, always grasping for better and more. ‘This is a gift, it comes with a price/Who is the lamb and who is the knife?’ The gift, perhaps, is talent, artistic capability, and sometimes it’s unclear who has the authority—the artist or the art, which can feel like an exterior force bearing down upon her, causing her pain, pushing her beyond her limits. These power dynamics also resonate with those that fuel the erotic relationships in the novel, though I don’t think there’s much question of who the sacrificial object is, and who threatens violence. Attention, acclaim and eros galvanise Hannah, but she remains aware of her vulnerability, and her conscientiousness as an artist is largely motivated by dread about the arrangement with her patron, Elke, crashing down around her. 

5. Lorde, “Perfect Places,” “Liability,” “Writer in the Dark”

These songs are sensitive to the ecstatic, self-destructive attempts at release that punctuate spells of anguish and self-doubt, in romantic love as much as creativity. This tension underlies all of Hannah’s actions and choices throughout the novel. ‘Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark,’ is obviously a line I feel an affinity with, but more because I think writers are annoying to date than what Lorde implies, which is that writers/artists have the power to blow up your life with the intensity of their emotions, not least because they have a global stage on which to express said emotions. But there’s another way of interpreting this line that feels more accurate to Hannah. If you are possessed by a creative vocation your desire for it will be stronger than your desire for a person, it will make you selfish, wilful, emotionally unavailable, and I think this becomes true for Hannah at several key points in the novel. 

6. Gracie Abrams, “I Love You, I’m Sorry”

Ok, will you indulge me one Abrams song? Coming to the end of the novel, it was useful to have a song ready at hand that expressed regret, wistfulness, and impossibility. Listening to so much contemporary anguished young woman pop music might seem ill-suited to writing about this period of history, but the novel is, at its heart, a coming-of-age story inspired by the diaries and letters of young women who continued to worry about love and desire even as the world as they knew it collapsed around them—this was my justification, at least.  

Truthfully, though, this song became more like a sedative I would administer after I finished writing for the day. I listened to it so many times during the gestation of the novel that when I eventually happened across the music video (some eighteen months after I’d first heard it) I felt a cold, dissociative dread set in. These were my thoughts and feelings, not hers; it didn’t matter that the song was comprised of references that had no bearing on my life. I have since come to realise, sanely, that these are in fact Abrams’ experiences to sing about. But I feel a certain amount of pride (and embarrassment) at the deranged number of times I played it in the latter half of that year (according to Spotify, nearly 500). 

7. Joanna Newsom, “Does Not Suffice”

So much of Venus, Vanishing is about the pleasure—sensual and visual—Hannah takes in garments, and how her work as a seamstress comes to shape her aesthetic as a fine artist. This song feels like an investigation, in Virginia Woolf’s words, of ‘frock consciousness’—a state I hope my novel provides some access to too. The emotional, tactile cataloguing of colours, textures and fabrics shares the imaginative aims of my own writing about clothes. 

8. Paul Simon, “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War”

Simon is possibly my favourite lyricist. I love his poetic, playful, moving storytelling—there are songs on Graceland that make me very envious as a writer—so I was thrilled when I discovered this sweet, tender piece of art historical fiction writing, inspired by a photograph of surrealist Magritte and his wife taken by the German photographer Lothar Wolleh. 

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

Rebecca Birrell is an art historian and a Bye-Fellow in the History of Art at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. She was formerly the curator of nineteenth and twentieth century paintings and drawings at the Fitzwilliam Museum and has occupied curatorial positions at the Jewish Museum London, the Department of Prints and Drawing at the British Museum, and at the Charleston Trust. She studied English literature at University College London, followed by a master’s in women’s studies at the University of Oxford and a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art. Venus, Vanishing is her debut 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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Emma Smith-Stevens follows up on one of my favorite novels of the century, The Australian, with the surprising and powerful story collection, Greyhounds.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“In one particular standout, “Neighbors,” a widow watches her neighbor, who struggles with hoarding disorder, find meaning and joy in rehabilitating retired greyhounds but can’t resist sabotaging that happiness. Threaded with dark humor and rendered with incisive prose, these stories will resonate with fans of Kristen Roupenian (You Know You Want This, 2019) and Marie-Helene Bertino (Exit Zero, 2025).”

In her own words, here is Emma Smith-Stevens’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Greyhounds:

Writing my first book, a novel called The Australian, overlapped with composing the stories Greyhounds, which took about fourteen years. Throughout that time, I was publishing short fiction, essays, and occasionally humor. When I became aware that I had readers, or even that I potentially could—especially when my work began appearing online—I was horrified by the idea of “writing from life.” My life, anyway. I’m reminded of cultures in which people believe that having one’s photograph taken will steal their souls. I dreaded writing in the first person. My novel is about a man from the other side of the world. Listen, though. Memory is imagination, the stories we construct to make sense of being alive—so it’s all kind of silly. My personhood, my life, are not separate from my imaginings. Nonetheless, “I” felt like a humiliating disclosure, pinched-pale flesh while wearing a too-tight outfit under fluorescent lighting. 

When I think of the memoir I started writing several years ago, while Greyhounds was still in the works, great Southern author and my graduate school professor, Padgett Powell (e.g. Edisto, The Interrogative Mood, Indigo), warned me sternly not to write a “me-more.” I think he was quoting Gore Vidal. I tried, for over three years, to write a memoir in which I did not appear even once. A clever trick, it so happens, if one can pull it off. I cannot. Who can? Nabokov. See: Look at the Harlequins (1974). Thanks for humbling me, catchers of indigo snakes and butterflies, respectively. 

*

The stories in Greyhounds can be sad, and if you knew which flickers alight from memory, which after writing The Australian I began inviting into my writing, it would maybe sting worse. I don’t know, though, and it doesn’t really matter. Greyhounds benefits from being fiction.

No, it’s not depressing, just sad where life hurts. Funny, too. It’s not a “sex book,” though I was flattered to have been called a “sex writer” one time by a star writer. Hello: it’s just me, doing my best to tell the truth using unhinged lies and a few truth-truths, here and there. The astronaut stuff in the story “Orbit”—that’s factual. The space station, the reaching hand. Like I said, who cares? 

Another thought: fiction is either false or true. It depends on the depth of imagination and empathy; style, rhythm, silence; honesty and depth of feeling and meticulousness; and an irrepressible desire to make sentences so tight they ping. The truth or lie on the page is not about facts or fables but the pulp at the core of the words, put in a particular order, by a mind; and ultimately, it comes down to whether that mind is fearless or fearful when it looks into its own messy center.

*

Greyhounds is a slender volume spectacularly designed by Carrie Guss. You may be wondering how to read it. Here we go. Open up that little compartment at the top of your sternum just below the Adam’s apple, and place a heavy, cold stone inside, the kind that makes tears feel imminent and swallowing feel so… My God, that stone? Obsidian. Maybe Tiger’s Eye. In any case, it’s been polished, not left coarse or jagged. Don’t worry. I’m just standing waiting to pay for my gas, check out my groceries, at the post office, and then I think: people are beautiful. Or, remembering how the woman in her 60’s working in the toll booth before the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge said, “Have a good day,” and I smiled—and, out of view, I sobbed. Later, I see a man throw a coffee stirrer on the ground at a gas station, and I think: we all deserve a brutal demise, except the light-giving miracles among us: the toll booth woman, babies and children, oh—and angels, obviously. I don’t believe in angels, but 70% of Americans do. Shouldn’t that be enough? For me? And you?

*

Greyhounds is sad, but what isn’t sad? And who? Are you sad? If not, are you okay? The book’s funny, too. I hate the word “levity,” and thankfully I think Greyhounds is not for people who are too good for the word “funny,” and instead say “levity.”

*

On 12/15/2015, I became ill. I have not, for even a moment, felt free of sickness since I woke up that day. Initially, I was found to have Lyme and a second tick-borne disease called Babesia. I treated them aggressively for a year but was worse than ever. I was then diagnosed with three autoimmune diseases and various complications. They keep rolling in. I get infusions, take medications, keep myself walking my dogs several times a day, try not to look back. 

I saw my bloodwork in the cursed patient portal yesterday. I’m trying to be whatever, but it sucked. Zoom out and you’ll see that the big, the huge, the enormous things are mixed, fused, muddled, rivering betwixt and between one another. Always. Everything’s a mess. I love my life. My body wants me dead. I want the diseases gone. I’ll do anything. I’d go down with the ship, but I am the ship—and the ocean. I’m talking about specters and shapes in my field of vision.

*

My husband S’s birthday was yesterday, and I watched our four little nieces—his brother’s daughters—pile on him when we entered their house, screaming their mispronounced version of his name. Later, the eight-year-old and eldest, C, issued complex instructions for a game of her own invention to me, my husband, and her two younger sisters (the fourth sister was a newborn)… C was a flight attendant and also a passenger who needed a beverage, and when the passenger went to the bathroom, C would reappear as her own evil twin. She gave us all a list of rules of conduct, which my husband and I couldn’t keep straight. Somehow her little sisters could. That scene—the girls’ laughter, all our shared happiness—felt realer and more true than my own self.

*

I have a memory of lying in the center of a large hospital room, which looked like an operating room, though I was not having surgery, so why would this be? In walked three women in white coats with their names and M.D. embroidered on the breast. I was vaguely aware that they were talking, but they seemed to be at a great distance. It did not occur to me that I might be the subject of their conversation. I felt like a voyeur. Then, one doctor, looking concerned, asked the others if I’d had an EEG. Her colleague said, “Yes, 48-hours, and an L.P.” Something, results were something-something. All of a sudden, I tumbled into a mainframe, into my body, a lone seed in a pod. “There she is,” said a tall doctor with brown, frizzy hair and a tender smile. I felt like a baby.

I don’t recall much about my talk with this doctor. I might not have said a word. I do know she told me about a book. The title had “winter” in it; maybe The Wintertime or The Wintering. She said, “It’s written by Katherine… Oh shoot, I can’t remember her last name. Katherine with a K.” The doctor approached the guardrail of my gurney and stood above but not over me. (There’s a big difference.) Like a dream-wave: one that protects and never crashes. “You,” she said, “are in the winter of your life.” I don’t remember what she said next, because though I’m much improved, I’ve been home for a few years, can think far more clearly, and people are correct distances from me, I’m still a little frozen, parts of me stinging, throbbing as they awaken, especially when touched. Snow still falls, icicles like needles from tree limbs. Nonetheless, I’m moving, going somewhere. The next morning, the frizzy-haired doctor appeared again. I was trying to talk but couldn’t. Then, just when she was walking out the door, I said, “Katherine with a K.” She turned and smiled. “You remember.”

Human moments in medical spaces are extra beautiful. There’s no way to describe them except to say, again we’re back to angels, something better than a promise—something larger and more real than your very own life, which is being handed to you, like a globe. No, the whole universe.

*

I used to be able to listen to music sitting in loud cafés while I wrote. Now I need at least semi–private spaces to think and write. I walked and drove out the songs on my playlist, thinking about the stories I imagined and gathered in my Craigslist photo and quote collection. Sometimes I thought of my own stories. Those days, years, that old life, I walked and walked. 

I spent the early years of writing these stories walking along train tracks in Rhinecliff and Germantown and Hudson, towns in New York’s Hudson Valley. For a year, a terrible one, I lived in Los Angeles, wished I had the guts to be a stripper, met a guy while I was crying on the sidewalk, I overshared, he overshared, you know. I went to graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville—those years were three spinning gold records that kept playing these songs and adding new ones. I live in Brooklyn now. My medical team has told me to stay in New York City, so here I am, with my husband and two Azerbaijani rescue dogs, strays-turned-massage enthusiasts, Lena and Bob.

My husband I moved to Brooklyn to be near my doctors and family. Boom: the pandemic. My husband and I got COVID almost immediately. I was infused with monoclonal antibodies immediately, in a trailer with a space heater at Maimonides Hospital—the antibodies were magic; three days later I felt better than I had in years. Soon the effects wore off, but something new seemed possible. Seems possible. 

*

You may realize these are love songs, fuck songs, craving and desire and touching yourself songs. Jealousy songs. Crying about them, missing them, goddam them, who need’s them? All that stuff is hopeful. There’s life in those things. Music loves me up and drives me forward—never home. I don’t have one. (I mean, in a literal sense, my husband and I rent an apartment—don’t worry.) The only real home I’ve known, though, has been my body. I’ve been evicted. I go forward, on the edge of my seat, flooring the pedal down, gunning it toward love, hunger, thirsting for more life, more love, more life, more love. Searching for the road home.

*

I started pairing the playlist So I Know You’re Real with photos from Craigslist during a high point: thriving in graduate school, making new friends, finding mentors, my bipolar disorder largely in remission. I met my husband when he was a prospective student visiting my MFA program in creative writing. When I got sick a few months after we married, I stopped So I Know You’re Real. I didn’t feel so real myself, I suppose. I was so desperate for relief. Early on, I looked into the liquid of doctors’ eyes, blue, hazel, brown, green; sometimes I thought they might cry, they might already be crying, right there before me, a shimmering wall of tears—and I’d realize it was my eyes straining against overflow.

The important fact about this mix is that I put these songs together for a Tumblr I used to have—stories I found on Craigslist personal ads (“Missed Connection,” mostly) about need, loneliness, nostalgia, anger, love, crushing hard, craving, abandonment, voids. This playlist was embedded as the soundtrack on the Tumblr along with the photos below (and many more). Somehow these songs announced themselves as an obvious playlist for Greyhounds. The music and images and captions borrowed from Craigslist “Missed Connections” and other personals are called, collectively, So I Know You’re Real. 

Do you remember how in posts on the site, people would request: “Put ‘fly girl’ in the subject line so I know you’re real’” or “type WICCA N WANDS so I know you’re real?” Type “I love you forever” so I know you’re real.” Write “Big boy.” Write “My Manga future wife.” Write “Angels all over” so I know you’re real.

So I Know You’re Real

also at Largehearted Boy:

Emma Smith-Stevens’s playlist for her novel The Australian

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

Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of The Australian. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Kaaron Warren’s Going to Summertime is an unsettling novella of friendship and greed.

Aurealis Magazine wrote of the book:

“Morbid and cajoling, sensual and startling. An astonishingly bizarre novella. And a treat for those finally encountering indomitable Warren’s rich and most peculiar stories.”

In her own words, here is Kaaron Warren’s Book Notes music playlist for her novella Going to Summertime:

Going to Summertime has two main settings. A hairdressing salon, where the four women work, and Summerland Place, the haunted cul-de-sac they go to explore. There’s no music in the cul-de-sac, except perhaps from faint strains coming from nearby houses, hints of living people going about the day.

It’s the salon that is rich with music. Every salon I’ve ever been in has had its own musical style. It might be the radio, or it might be a personal compilation.

In the Red Mullet Salon, the playlist depends on who’s working. Georgia will play music to suit the customer. Sunnie loves to sing and dance around like an angel. Erin loves rap music and swearing. Tamara loves the maudlin. Any song about death is all right by her.

Here’s a mix from all of them.

Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit
This is very much a Sunnie song, both thematically and musically.

Hill Top Hoods – Don’t Happy, Be Worry
A great Aussie band, been knocking out hits for about 20 years. This one is a ripper, one of those songs that sounds like it might be happy but is really not.

Amyl and the Sniffers – Big Dreams
Another great Aussie band. Amyl and the Sniffers hit all the buttons for Erin and for Tamara, who battle the others to play this music as often as they can.

Camille O’Sullivan – Hurt
They all love this one, especially after a difficult client. Sometimes they’ll play it low while the customer is still there.

The Angels – Dawn is Breaking
Australian pub band, the first band I ever saw live. I’m sneaking a few of my favourite songs in here, but that’s fine. This one brings back memories of friends, and friendship is an important element to Going to Summertime.

Tonada de Luna Llena – Mar Loi , Sara Sambola, and Irene Zugaza
This one’s for Sunnie. She has a beautiful voice; she could have been something. Instead, she’s cutting hair and trying to keep clean.

YNG Martyr – Die in the End
YNG Martyr hits the spot for Erin. Her mother hates this music, so she waits until she’s in the salon to blast it loud.

Ren – Hi Ren
All four women love this song, and they’ll sing it at the tops of the voices while cleaning up at the end of the day. Stumbling over the words, getting them wrong. They all take something different from it.

John Craigie – Helena
I haven’t named Sunnie’s mother, but I’m going to say Helena. This is how she feels about her mother, and she’s not wrong.

Smoke on the Water – Deep Purple
Their sleazy landlord, Felix, loves to sit in the salon and perv at them. He air guitars this song, like so many before him. He thinks it makes him attractive but it really doesn’t.

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

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She has published six multi-award winning novels: Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole , Tide of Stone and The Underhistory, and seven short story collections, her most recent being Calvaria Fell, with Cat Sparks, from Meerkat Press. Her stories have been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and the Stoker, and appeared in both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’sYear’s Best anthologies. Her writing podcast Let the Cat In showcases ideas, objects, and inspirations

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Wendy Wimmer follows up her impressive story collection Entry Level with a debut novel, The Doomscroller’s Companion, that dazzles with its storytelling through a variety of narratives.

Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:

“Provocative. . . . An engaging novel in which ramped-up pandemic anxieties are reflected in online interactions, amid which choosing embodied connections proves best.”

In her own words, here is Wendy Wimmer’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Doomscroller’s Companion:

In late 2009, I went on a white shark cage diving trip to the Farallon Islands, a little-known wildlife refuge about 30 miles off San Francisco’s coastline. As luck would have it, I didn’t see any sharks (although others on our expedition did see several), but I spent that twelve hours staring up at this forbidden landscape of crumbling rocks, kelp flies and more sea birds and seals than you could count and thinking “If there was a zombie apocalypse, that would be the perfect refuge because no one would be trying to get on this island. They’d take one look and nope right the fuck out.” Or one smell, because the accumulated dense fog of bird and wildlife excrement and ammonia was almost visible.

Upon my return, I became obsessed with the history of the islands – the Egg War in the 19^th century, the indigenous people, Juan Cabrillo and Sir Francis Drake, and became locked on the history of ecological nightmares inflicted on this beautiful collection of cliffs, shoals and secret caves. Not only were sea bird eggs pillaged to serve San Francisco’s breakfast tables (to the tune of 500,000 eggs a MONTH) and the fur seals hunted to extirpation, during the mid 20^th century, the US government sunk over 44,000 containers of radioactive nuclear waste, as well as an entire radioactive Naval aircraft carrier – the USS Independence – next to the islands, and then named it a Wildlife Refuge. Sounds like us.

The one thing that all zombie movies have in common is that zombie movies don’t exist in those worlds. If they did, everyone would automatically know how to react when you saw a bunch of rotting corpses shambling toward you. Zombie movies and shows like The Last of Us and The Walking Dead have trained us to survive a zombie apocalypse, with those double taps, cardio tips, base building tips, etc. But what if a pandemic happened and everyone was so ready to go into zombie movie mode that they started murdering sick people?

Throughout the 2010s, I wrote and rewrote this novel, finishing it in fall of 2019 and started querying agents in February 2020. Instantly I had a lot of interest and then, well, that interest became very strong “not for me” once March 2020 hit. What happens when your super speculative novel becomes not at all speculative? It gets the benefit of psychological distance and then another rewrite.

A fun fact about me: Back before “blog” was a common word in our lexicon, back before the turn of the century (yes, the 1900s), I was writing about my life online (some of the older archives are still preserved at my website), hand coding the HTML because WordPress didn’t exist yet. I was a prehistoric, almost neolithic internet influencer. I even had some brand deals, a beauty closet filled with literally thousands of dollars in skin and beauty products, as well as a fashion closet filled with free clothes from indie fashion designers. Conde Nast hired me to build two of their dot com brands and paid handsomely for what I used to just give the internet for free. My work was featured in household name publications and websites, I appeared on nascent vlogs and video podcasts. It was surreal. Then the 2008 dot com crash changed everything – I lost three jobs, including my day job, in the span of eight days– and I was burned out by being what I called, “the internet’s liver.” I felt like I was filtering and metabolizing all the worst things into consumable forms. I stopped updating my own blog and rejected monetizing everything because it felt disingenuous. Jokes on me, I had earned so much Googlefu at that point, I probably could have just been a legit internet identity brand if I had cared more. And that was the genesis of Jane’s character – she’s what might have happened to me if I had pursued that path further, become loved and shared by millions and then struggled to invent more novelty to draw internet eyes and clicks.

Holocene – Bon Iver

In The Doomscroller’s Companion, both Jane and Brian are on separate islands, staring back at civilization as it begins to unravel, both from their vantage points and via webcams. Brian’s safe and protected on his island until the ice forms over the water and the island is now vulnerable to the people who are infected with the insomnia plague and are dealing with ambulatory coma-type situations. The world is reacting as though it’s a zombie apocalypse but it’s not actually zombies, they’re people who are ill, out of their minds with delusion and hallucinations. A fellow Wisconsinite, Bon Iver is capturing the coldness of the upper Midwest while being alienated and yearning for connection. “And at once, I knew I was not magnificent, strayed above the highway aisle, jagged vacance, thick with ice but I could see for miles, miles, miles.” The ever-beating thrum of Brian’s inner monologue is that he’s an imposter as an artist, flummoxed by his successes and constantly finding excuses for why it’s not his own talent that is driving his commercial success. Bon Iver sings “It’s a part of me apart from me” and “now to know it in my memory” – when the entirety of our social media stream is both us and not us at all, out of order, manipulated by an all-power algorithm that decides who is heard and seen and who is not.

Fun fact: My working title for The Doomscroller’s Companion was “Fake Internet Friends” – I knew I wasn’t going to keep that title, but I suspect it lingers just outside the margins, as real as the ghosts that share Jane’s bedroom on the Farallon Islands.

The Shins – Simple Song

This novel explores so much nostalgia for the Before Times, before we ever had this societal breakdown, the juxtaposition of Internet 2.0 with Internet 5.0, when our currency was in pretend internet popularity points, likes, follows and shares. Like so many moments of our lives, we don’t realize the importance of those glimpses until long after they have passed. I envision this song playing in the background of the scene set in the mid-Aughts, Jane riding a borrowed Fixie bicycle among the tech bros playing ultimate Frisbee on San Francisco’s Crissy Field. In that blog post, Jane describes to the internet: “And for one brief instant, while flying along this perfect bike path, I felt like I could peddle that way forever, making concentric circles around the peninsula, using hills and gravity to propel me into perpetual motion, like an executive desk toy. Click clack click clack I would never ever stop. It was a glorious moment. And then I wiped out.”

She has a high-side fall, this huge dramatic bike crash but no one seems to notice. In that moment, she falls out of love with San Francisco, her lucrative career in the tech boom, and faces who she believes she is, and what she believes she deserves out of life. Mercer, the songwriter and lead singer for The Shins, writes “I know that things can get really rough when you go it alone. Don’t go thinking you gotta be tough, and play like a stone. Could be there’s nothing else in our lives, so critical as this little home” Later in the novel, we see the moment again, only this time from Brian’s point of view – and we learn that it is the moment when they meet in real life, sending each of their fates into an intertwined online ‘e-lationship’ that will impact their lives in countless ways. They become each others’ online soulmates but both are too afraid to break the enchantment by meeting again in real life. As the song opines, “Love’s such a delicate thing that we do with nothing to prove, which I never knew” and “I told you about all those fears and away they did run You sure must be strong and you feel like an ocean made warm by the sun.” This song is that shiny feeling of meeting and clicking with someone and being just a little bit addicted to the world seen through they’re perception, and the image of you they are interacting with.

OneRepublic – Connection

Beyond my premise of zombie movies training us to react to a zombie-like scenario, my other working inspiration for the novel was that when the apocalypse happens, it will mostly be filtered through and to some extent, be felt through social media. The lyrics opine “There’s so many people here then why am I so lonely? Can I get a connection.”  Beyond Jane and Brian’s textual relationship – which Jane calls their e-lationship – there’s the constant yearning of other characters who might or might not be known to us in the narrative. We see Jane’s named social media stream, we see one from Brian’s ex-girlfriend, but other characters exist only as their social media handles. Reddit posters write long theses about human colony collapse and encourage fellow Redditors to end it sooner than later, Google’s suggested search terms offer “why am I still here?” and “Can insomnia make you fat?” The social media streams are full of tiny stories from the lives of strangers, along with the number of likes, comments and shares. @Gemma1989 says “Just made friends with neighbor who has never spoken to me or met my gaze. I’ve only lived here for six and a half years and we share a driveway, so that was cool” while @MightyMych offers to pick up groceries for people who are unable to leave their houses and at one point says “If you’re lonely in lockdown and need someone to talk to, I’d love to hear from someone” which is hearted by 429 people but far fewer take her up on it. @DBmm talks about the people who have been lost to the pandemic, but without funerals “it’s like they’re still there, not answering my emails,” a sentiment hearted by 3.9K followers and shared 87 times.

The text lays out all these flailing attempts for connection that interject within Brian’s and Jane’s narratives, emails, chats and blog posts, a Greek chorus that reminds us that even when we’re alone, we are reaching out into the ether.

Half-alive – Everything Machine

The diptych to the social media element is the facet of technology and the algorithm that acts as both a censor and a feeder to what we consume. In every crisis, count upon the fact that we’ll be making jokes and using black humor to cope with the cognitive dissonance. Our cell phones have become “everything machines.” Of the insomnia plague, Brian says “We each hold tiny blue suns. up to our faces and then are surprised when our primate selves can’t get a decent moment’s rest.” These lyrics counter his disdain, arguing “I’m your second nature, never leave your side I’m a growing cancer (the feeling of sleepless nights), I’m your serotonin, I’m your burning eyes, Baby, don’t you cry, I’m right here tonight” and promise to “keep you close when it’s getting late” and “make you feel at home ‘til the pain is numb.” Are these machines helping or hindering our existence? Are they literally keeping us from connecting because we hold them between each other?

Stars – Your Ex-Lover Is Dead

Stars is one of my most favorite bands in the entire world, but I listened to this song repeatedly while drafting The Doomscroller’s Companion. It captures the intensity of connection and then moving on only to be faced with who you were in another lifetime – the duet between two people, one of whom was devastated by the loss and the other who can’t even remember the person’s name.

Jane details her romantic devastations online, displaying her self-incriminating inner dialogue for millions of readers. Her hunky tech bro was just never really going to be in love with her, despite the evidence she had clung to all along. In her blog, Jane writes, “That night, while drunk, he says he will never love anyone as much as he loved his first girlfriend. He says I’m unlike any woman he’s ever met. He says I’m special, someone he knows will be his best friend forever. Dear Reader, you may have already guessed he says these things out of order.”

In that scene, I was very much thinking of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan singing in heartbreaking harmony “I’m not sorry I met you, I’m not sorry it’s over, I’m not sorry there’s nothing to say.” Chris Seligman writes baroque pop operas, capturing these gorgeous and lonely moments with a sardonic French horn thru-line. We need more pop with melodicas and French horns, right? Maybe that’s just the marching band geek in me.

Fun fact Doomscroller trivia: the character Patty was named for Pat McGee, Stars’ drummer. McGee’s nickname is Paddy, but when I met him, I heard “Patty” and was so confused, like Jane is when she meets Patty for the first time.

The Cure – Plainsong

There are several cross-country road trips in my novel – I love a good road trip, especially one fueled by running away from or to something. I’ve crossed the country by automobile several times myself and I’m 99% ready to fully give up air travel in exchange for auto and train travel, because you just get to see everything up close and spend time in your own mind. When Jane embarks on one of those trips, the first thing she does is queue of The Cure’s Disintegration on the car’s stereo. The entire album is flawless, and while I probably wouldn’t rank Plainsong as my absolute favorite on the compilation, it feels like a disembarkation, a transition point (probably why it’s the first track). The lyrics are bittersweet, “I think I’m old and I’m feeling pain, ” you said “And it’s all running out Like it’s the end of the world, ” you said “And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead” Then you smiled for a second”  It feels like a triumphant reclamation of the self. Sofia Coppola must agree, as she uses it to great effect in Marie Antoinette, as the titular character walks to her coronation.

Fun fact: When Billboard ranked The Cure’s top 40 songs, it put Plainsong fourth, calling it “a slowly unfolding poem for the apocalypse” and well, if someone said that about The Doomscroller’s Companion, I’d never stop talking about it.

Lucy Dacus – Night Shift

This song is all about the transition from disbelief and shock to anger post-breakup, which both Jane and Brian certainly go through on their own parallel but distinct paths. The lyrics are insistent that the singer is fine, she’s fine, she’s fine, even though the singer then asks in the chorus “let me kiss your lips so I know how it felt” and holding themselves responsible for their own actions, knowing that they will “walk for hours in the dark feeling all hell.”  While Brian and Jane’s online relationship has never involved physical touch, they’ve been trapped in a stasis of a pretend situationship. Jane is afraid that her online persona is impossible to live up to in real life and doesn’t want to risk losing Brian’s friendship – or whatever it is – by meeting up in person again. She relies upon his memory of her during the one chance meeting, as the lyrics say, “forget you’ve ever saw me at my best… it’s too dangerous to fall so young, take back what you said, can’t lose what you never had.” In the novel’s opening scene, she thinks about Brian, “No one could live up to the persona I’ve created. Jane ’Ere is a goofy best friend that millions of people Like and Share. People rarely Like the real me… Disappointment flickering on Brian’s face after so many years. He’d try to hide it, but I’d see. I depend upon his foggy memory, a girl in San Francisco so long ago, a stranger who didn’t matter.”

Brian, separately, has his own reasons for maintaining the online-only status. “Jane was my perfect friend, an ideal relationship, held at arm’s length behind my phone’s smart screen. I was in total control. She only got to see this ideal version of Brian, one I couldn’t accidentally fuck up.” He acknowledges the relationship dynamic is fragile, saying “We seemed to believe our email friendship was magical, and to meet in person would render the spell completely broken. As though this knowing without knowing was the only thing keeping the illusion going. We were strangers, two ships passing in the cyber night.” Of course, they insist repeatedly that they’re strangers to the other, unable to even admit to themselves that they know each other better than they know themselves.

Fun fact: author Carmen Maria Machado appears in the video for this song! I’m such a fan of her work and spotting her in the video was an absolute literary Easter Egg.

That Funny Feeling – Bo Burnham

This is the literal track to the most recent pandemic, Burnham’s tender voice just unleashing a song version of doomscrolling during a mass disaster. “Full agoraphobic, losing focus, cover blown, a book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone, total dissociation, fully out of your mind, Googling “derealization,” hating what you find, that unapparent summer air in early fall, the quiet comprehending of the ending of it all.” This cheery little fireside singalong melody just keeps assuring “we were overdue, but it’ll be over soon, just wait, ba-da-da ba-da-da, ba-da-da-da-dum” and it’s just a cheerful little love song to everything being terrible. I say “the most recent pandemic” because of course, it won’t be the last.

Fun fact that isn’t so fun: In 2010, I started writing this novel about the very impossible and speculative situation where the entire world needs to lock down quickly due to a super contagious and highly fatal disease. I spent years working to get it believable, to make sure that people would believe a full global lockdown COULD happen, even dialing things back in severity, and then it did happen and everyone who had read the draft asked if I was a witch. Then I had to rewrite the entire draft because of course, COVID had to have happened and now it’s a novel about us going through it all again, in totally different and more surreal way, as we’re all a bit braver, having survived the last one, and maybe just a bit careless or emboldened with what we’d do differently next time.

The Decemberists – Once in My Life

Once I heard someone say, “The Decemberists are what English lit grad students play on dates when they’re trying to get laid” and you know what, that’s probably true. But I love The Decemberists so much and so many of the songs are short stories more than songs. This isn’t one of them, it’s probably the most poppy of all Decemberists songs, but Colin Meloy calls it both “a celebration of sadness” and “a longing holler to the universe against one’s perceived otherness.” Each of the characters in this novel feels some kind of otherness – Jane and Brian are carrying tremendous grief over the deaths of their mothers and past traumas. Brian is dealing with agoraphobia and other anxieties while still trying to be a cool, snarky and above-it-all artiste. Patty has been misunderstood his entire life as someone who is physically huge while being a virtuoso and champion of the tiniest and most fragile birds. Jane’s aunt Heidi’s unspoken motto is “if you can’t be loved, be needed” yet she’s grappling with a world that has no need for her. The characters in the novel have each “been waiting all (their) life” for something to click in, to be seen for who they are, to be treasured for who they are, not despite who they are. The synthesizer-heavy anthem echoes their individual hot messes. Each character is deeply lonely and yearning, watching the world stumble around but realizing that they’ve always been the main character in their own personal disaster movie, one that predated any pandemic.

“Wait For Me” (Hadestown)

Running the final proofreading for The Doomscroller’s Companion I was obsessively listening to the Hadestown original Broadway cast recording. I had resisted letting this musical into my brain forever – I weirdly loved Hamilton so much that for me, Hadestown represented a threat, and I had heard “Flowers” without narrative context and thought it was too obvious and annoying (it’s now one of my favorites). But then I finally saw the musical at the end of 2025 and fell in absolute love with the entire thing. And then, during the third run at the final proof, suddenly I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that Brian and Jane were Eurydice and Orpheus.  Hadestown begins with Hermes informing the audience that it’s a sad song and that the musical would be sad, and yet, we’re going to tell it again. Unlike Orpheus and Eurydice, Brian and Jane become each other’s imperfect salvation. Jane was in hell. Brian was too. They both help the other find their way out. In the novel’s climax, one character rushes through an infected landscape filled with sleepwalkers and dangerous shooters, toward the other, which echoes in this song “Wait for me, I’m coming, Wait, I’m coming with you, Wait for me, I’m coming too, I’m coming too” while the Fates jeer back “Who are you? Where do you think you are going? Who are you? Why are you all alone? Who do you think you are? Who are you to think that you can walk a road that no one ever walked before?” which echoes in both Jane and Brian’s refrains of imposter syndrome and self-recriminations. Hadestown is also an inspection of late-stage capitalism and fear, of being trapped by circumstance and poverty, about how the institution will insist it’s protecting you while using you to build a wall that traps you inside. I didn’t set out to write a novel that so strongly sided with the working class, and yet, sometimes these things just happen. Whoops.

Arvo Pärt — Spiegel Im Spiegel

Much of The Doomscroller’s Companion deals with the symptoms of not being able to fall asleep – a type of hell that I dealt with for decades. Anyone who has ever spent a night desperately needing to fall asleep but instead stuck in a mental prison of ideas, anxiety and memories will understand how awful that is. One of my coping strategies is an audio trigger – essentially condition my brain to be in a sleepy state with a specific playlist that I listen to every night. By repeating the same songs in exactly the same sequence, my brain had something to latch onto but there was no novelty – the songs were always the same. After  more than a decade, the same playlist knocks me right out. The playlist is only 47 minutes long and I rarely make it past the fifth song. It starts out in a chill mood, The Decemberists’ “California One (Youth and Beauty Brigade)” and The Cure’s “Plainsong” and “Last Dance” from Disintegration (my single favorite album of all time), then gradually devolves into quieter songs without words, Kevin Shields’ “Goodbye” and Air’s “Alone in Kyoto” and finally,  “Spiegel Im Spiegel.” I’m rarely awake by the time my Sleepy Time playlist gets to this final piece, but sometimes I wake up during it and instead of panic, it soothes. For a playlist inspired by a novel about an insomnia plague, it feels right to end with an ingredient for my own cure for insomnia.

I fell in love with this composition from the About Time soundtrack originally, but since then, I’ve spotted it in so many places. Michael Schur chose this for the series finale of The Good Place because he found it on YouTube and noticed that every single commenter talked about how much peace and joy it had given them. The piece echoes itself in the melody, a call and response which I find deeply satisfying from a narrative perspective – my writing often circles in on itself at the sentence level and the narrative arcs themselves. It’s such a deceptively simple melody but like all things compelling, hides a much deeper truth and is in conversation with the listener. Rather than repetitive, the modality is concentric, creating a pattern that is almost like a maternal heartbeat. Of the composition returning to the central pitch of A, Pärt said it was like “returning home after being away.” This novel is very much about Jane and Brian trying to escape themselves throughout their lives and finally returning to their home, to a new form of home, a found family, and being better for it.

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

Wendy Wimmer is the author of the short story collection Entry Level, selected by Deesha Philyaw as the winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize. She lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Devon Halliday’s novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay is filled with masterful storytelling and memorable characters and is one of the year’s strongest debuts.

David Haynes wrote of the book:

“In this enchanting tale of small-town love, artisanal bread, and sketchy real estate, Devon Halliday explores the webs that connect us and the mysterious forces that break those webs apart. Everything and everyone in this wonderful novel is rendered with precision, wit, and uncompromising humanity.”

In her own words, here is Devon Halliday’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay:

When I was young, I used to create mental music videos to accompany my favorite songs. As one song gave way to the next, the music video in my mind kept rolling, developing a vast plot that encompassed the lyrics of whatever songs were on shuffle that day. I loved the feeling of building a story through music, treating each new song as if it rose directly out of the mood of the last.

In the spirit of those long-ago music videos—alas, lost to history—I present an emotional road map of my novel, To Stay, To Stay, To Stay. If you listen to this playlist all the way through, the music video in your mind should recreate the plot of the novel with 99% accuracy… allowing, of course, for some differences in budget and casting.

icepick by Sadurn

We begin with a kind of rolling stasis. This song is about what it’s like to be in love—when it’s hard, but it’s still worth it, but it’s still hard. Doubts follow resolutions follow more doubts, like waves turning endlessly in the tide: “I get so frustrated about your communication / But I know you can’t help it, and I’m not really trying to change it.”

There’s so much in that not real. I’m not trying to change you—not really. Not all the time. Not when I remind myself not to. That’s where the characters of my novel begin: with good intentions and imperfect resolve.

Delphinium Blue by Cassandra Jenkins

As the novel settles in, we witness the characters at work in their respective jobs. Two tracks of thought run at all times: the autopilot track of labor, tasks, obligations, and the deeply submerged track of their real thoughts and worries. 

“Chin up / Stay on task / Wash the windows / Count the cash,” the singer reminds herself in this song, but meanwhile: “I hear your voice when I’m closing … I picture the sun hitting you.” In jobs that don’t require our full attention, our minds are free to wander into old and forgotten longings.

Mama You’ve Been on My Mind by George Harrison

When the characters of my novel catch themselves dwelling in fantasy, they try to shake themselves back to reality… with uneven results. This sweet and wistful song captures that feeling of missing someone you normally try not to think about. In fact, the singer gives us a couple possible reasons that his mind might have wandered (“maybe it’s the weather or something like that”) before he even tells us what it’s wandered to.

There’s a push-pull between admission and denial in this song, as the singer tries to clarify what exactly he’s trying to do. “I am not asking for you to say words like yes and no,” he assures the woman he probably still loves. “I’m just breathing to myself, pretending not that I don’t know / Mama you’re just on my mind.”

The best that the singer can claim for himself here is self-awareness… which is quite different, of course, from resisting the temptation to dwell in the first place. As the characters of my novel learn the hard way, self-awareness doesn’t always do us much good.

I Can’t Stay by The Killers

At this point in your music video, you should have a character who is in a mostly loving relationship, but who is also fixated on someone else. That’s not a tenable situation. It’s time for this character to make a decision—or almost time. As the singer of this song puts it: “I can’t stay very far / I can’t stay much longer.”

Maybe that means: I can’t stay out, wandering the streets in indecision. I’ve got to head home.

Or maybe that means: I can’t stay in this home a moment longer.

The characters of my novel make different choices when they reach this impasse. Some of them decide to head back into the shelter of the status quo. Some of them decide to blow everything up and start over. Whichever they choose, the decision is summed up by the final line of this song: “Riding my decision home.”

Alone Again Or by Love

This whole time, while the star of your music video has been brooding and pacing the streets of their neighborhood, deciding whether to stay or to go, someone has been waiting back at home for them. This is the song of that person waiting. “I won’t forget all the times I’ve waited patiently for you / And you do just what you choose to do / And I will be alone again tonight my dear.”

It’s a tough break—and yet this song has always felt joyful to me. Check out that horn solo. The disintegration of the status quo means clean slate, square one, new opportunities. That could turn out to be a good thing. After all, as the singer puts it, “I could be in love with almost everyone / I think that people are the greatest fun.” The heartbreak is big, but the world around it is still bigger.

Saved by Devon Halliday

The star of your music video has finally made their decision. No more pacing! They’re committed to the new path. They’re done transforming. They might even make some kind of declaration, like: “Forever’s nice, but this is what we get / I’ll take it.”

But there are hairline cracks running through this new commitment. “Maybe I was saved,” the singer suggests, again and again, and that maybe never goes away. Instead, the song builds to a crescendo and then fades out, never resolving. There’s even an anguished scream embedded in the mix. The chorus repeats like a mantra, insisting that all that indecision and heartache is over.

It has to be, right? I mean, your character just made their big decision. They’re not about to unmake it.

Certainty by Big Thief

But what if they made the wrong big decision? Is it too late to change their minds?

Certainty is, it turns out, a “wild, weaving” thing. There’s indecision in every line of this song. “Why do I string you along?” the singer wonders—but she also has a vision of some future together, once all this has been resolved: “You lay beside me / Sleeping on a plane in the future.” If the singer is stringing someone along, she’s stringing herself along too.

Sometimes you can’t get the competing truths in your mind to reconcile. When that’s the case, maybe the best you can do is to admit it: “I love you / Still don’t know.”

It’s hard to act without certainty. But when will that certainty ever come? Maybe the thing to do is just to stick with the decision you already made—until something finally gives.

Bill of Goods by Loudon Wainwright III

As we close in on the end of the novel, the characters have settled into the aftermath of their big decisions—but that aftermath isn’t working, and the characters know it. This song captures that in-limbo period when it’s too late to fix anything, but too soon to leave: “Everything will be all right / Remember when you thought that? / I sold you that bill of goods / Remember when you bought that?”

There’s bitterness in the song, but there’s also the kind of close observation that can only come from love. It’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins: “We gave each other such a hard time / But it sure was fun / Or was it?”

If there’s a moral to the whole mess of this decision-making process, it’s too soon to tell. We’ve moved beyond reason, justification, the weighing out of the pros and cons. There’s only one thing left to try.

Wild Ambitions by Yellow Magic Orchestra

All our resolutions, all our careful habits, all the things our friends have told us, all the things we’ve told ourselves—they fall away in the face of what we truly want. This song feels to me like running back across the plains of all my mistakes, retracing all those steps I took in the wrong direction. “I’m on my way to where you are / I’m running through the wildlands.”

The characters made their big decision, yes. But it didn’t stick. Now they’re going to make the opposite big decision.

Have they got it right this time?

Come On Up to the House by Tom Waits

The truth is, there is no right decision. There are just the decisions we make, and the stories we tell to make sense of them.

The star of your music video has been through a lot in the last thirty-eight minutes. They fretted about a huge, life-changing decision. They made that decision. They tried their best to stick with it. And then they went right back and made the opposite decision, because they simply couldn’t stay the course once they realized what they actually wanted.

This is the journey that the characters of my novel go on—and on the last page of the novel, you can see the characters starting to fit their decisions into a new story, a story that they’ll tell from now on. We always say hindsight is 20/20, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just persuasive.

The last song on this playlist is an invitation—to the star of your music video, to the characters of my novel, to you, to me, to everybody—to relinquish the illusion of agency. “There’s nothing in the world that you can do … You been whipped by the forces that are inside you … You’re high on top of your mountain of woe … You know you should surrender, but you can’t let go.”

Maybe you’re not really in control of your decisions, your desires, your fate. Maybe that’s for the best. “You’ve got to come on up to the house,” the singer calls you. Everyone else is up here waiting for you.h

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

Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize–winning writer. Her fiction appears in Ploughshares, One Story, and People Magazine, among other journals, and her criticism appears in Liberties and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She writes a popular Substack on craft, publishing, and the writing life.

Devon holds an MFA in Fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation scholarship, and a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She grew up in southeastern Ohio, and teaches creative writing at Ohio University.

Her debut novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay, published by McSweeney’s, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay is filled with inspiration for both writers and teachers of writing.

Ander Monson wrote of the book:

“The lyric essay is at heart a freaky space. The lyric essay is resistance to norming forms. The lyric essay is characterized by leaps: through white space, between different registers of meaning, between ledges of one kind of thinking or writing or genre and another. The lyric essay does not hide its stitches or its seams. What it seems is what it is. The lyric essay is disjunctive and refuses to be simplified for your convenience. The lyric essay is unruly and dislikes boxes. Like Super Happy Fun Ball we do not taunt it. Like a jart, we throw the lyric essay in the air and close our eyes and wait for it to fall. It could pierce us or something else. That it’s sharp means it works, that it reveals. I mean it’s dangerous. It’s risk. It’s that and these and all of this. Read instructions before application. Use The Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay with care.”

In their own words, here is the editors’ and contributors’ Book Notes music playlist for the anthology The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay:

Heidi Czerwiec, Co-Editor: “Frontier Psychiatrist” by The Avalanches

Like the cover image for this Field Guide, lyric essayists are crows and magpies, collecting shiny interesting bits and collaging them into something marvelous. The first time I heard the song “Frontier Psychiatrist”—composed entirely of samples from such sources as John Waters’ Polyester, recordings of comedy bits by Wayne & Shuster and Flip Wilson, and a 1968 orchestral and vocal performance by the Enoch Light Singers—I giggled all the way through it, which is how I react when delighted. Music critic Matthew Horton’s description of it equally applies to many of the best lyric essays: “busy, daft, composed of countless unconnected parts, yet somehow entirely natural as a whole.”

Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, Co-Editor: “Your Ghost” by Kristin Hersh

Kristin Hersh’s “Your Ghost,” from her 1994 debut solo album, Hips and Makers, is about a haunting, a loss or absence so powerful it becomes palpable. Not the jangling post-punk edge of Throwing Muses, or the reverbed ferocity of 50-Foot Wave, but something that hybridizes the emotional intensity of both bands into something new, something lyric, something stunningly vulnerable. Here, Hersh’s voice is unadorned, a raw wild honey that’s all sweetness and sting, accompanied by a simple background of acoustic guitar. She is Orpheus, with his lyre, padding down a darkened hallway, ready to “wake your ghost.” Poetry, song, and image all awaken, blur, complicate, and clarify the narrative in this liminal space between worlds, and Hersh, the singer/artist/writer, is unafraid to cross between the overworld and the underworld. The chorus consists simply of Hersh repeatedly singing “I think last night / you were driving circles around me” surprisingly harmonized by Michael Stipe, until everything becomes pattern, repetition, and visual poem as elegy, invocation, and resurrection.

We also invited contributors to this book to suggest songs that they felt captured the lyric essay quality or strategy that was the focus of their piece in the Field Guide. Many thanks to those who played along! Their picks are below:

Camille T. Dungy: “Shockedelica” by Prince

The ways Prince can weave narratives, tones, and influence to create such splendor of strength and tension while remaining ultimately playful never ceases to amaze. And the is song also braids in multiple vocal registers, all produced by the same voice. Prince name checks his alter ego. Listen carefully and you’ll not that he pitches his voice at a different register when Camille comes on mic. What an object lesson in telling more than one story from the same mind, much like the braided essay. 

Sarah Minor: “The Problem With Your Daughter” by Lord Huron

Lord Huron’s album Lonesome Dreams came out the year I started writing my visual essay “Into the Limen” (an excerpt of which appears in this book), which would take me another 5 years to complete. I wrote another piece from the same collection by staying up all night in the University of Arizona library, listening to the album on repeat. Once I was also a daughter with a problem, a kid who put words to what the family passed wordlessly. “Into the Limen” explores that kind of in between space as both a subject and a visual metaphor-—the wee hours and doorjambs where lyric essays seem to be able to reach their tendrils.

Diane Seuss: “Tom’s Diner (DNA Remix)” by Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner (DNA Remix)” makes broad use of the present tense via concrete details from the point of view of an alienated speaker. It contains a newspaper story, and rain, and rain-drenched hair, all of which appear in my model poem from frank: sonnets, and then the cathedral bells call Vega’s speaker back to a nostalgic past, a beloved “you,” and a picnic, but time’s pressure comes along in the form of the train the speaker must hurry to catch in the song’s present tense. Vega first recorded it a cappella. It was then remixed by the duo DNA, and it became a dance club hit. I love the notion that Vega wrote the song using tried and true narrative strategies, and then DNA brought the beat to the party. This is an example of the process of literary influence and improvisation, playing between forms.

Rowan McCandless: “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane

I love to write while John Coltrane, a Black jazz artist, plays over my stereo system. This song, “My Favorite Things,” reminds me of the memories I collect, write about, and collage together. The way he weaves experimentation and improvisation inspires me; how he is able to take this song, a white musical piece, and transform it to become his own. 

torrin a. greathouse: “Lateralus” by TOOL

Many of the same qualities that drew me to Alice Fulton’s engagement with fractals are the very same qualities that underlie my interest in progressive and experimental rock/metal. In particular, this track by TOOL embodies a complex utilization of fractal logics. Organized around the Fibonacci Sequence, “Lateralus” is at once winding and deeply structured. To name only a few of the constraints the band employs, the syllables in each line of the verses correspond to numbers within the sequence, while several of the lines occur at moments that align with the Golden Ratio. Despite this complexity, the lyrics of the song urge listeners to embrace randomness and a lack of control, to “swing on the spirals of our divinity and still be a human.” It’s hard to imagine a more valuable imperative for the application of fractal poetics than that.

Chelsea Biondolillo: “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead

Like a great essayist, one called upon to balance research, memoir, and no small amount of fine art, Radiohead is a band of many talents—from infectious earworms (“Creep”) to soaring cinematic epics (“Exit Music for a Film”). I saw them play in Portland in the 1990s for a couple of bucks and have been a fan ever since. One thing they do incredibly well is weave disparate parts into complex sonic wholes. “Paranoid Android” is a stellar example of this—we start in a subdued ballad, Yorke’s voice full of longing, then after two verses, wander into a starker bridge with a snarl. Suddenly we’re in a banger—guitars and drums thrashing. The song seesaws through these two sides, keening and rage, which seem as different as oil and water (or image and text), and yet…the result is cohesive, nuanced and moving. Just like a killer lyric essay. 

Aimee Nezhukumatathil “Homegrown Tomatoes,” by Guy Clark

I double-dog dare anyone to listen to this song and not have a big goofy grin on your face: “Plant ‘em in the spring, eat ‘em in the summer / All winter without ‘em is a culinary bummer.” As I tend my vegetable garden, I find myself humming this song while I’m checking for pests and plucking off any leaves scorched by the brutal Mississippi sun in late June. And if you can’t grow tomatoes at home, please do treat your tastebuds to getting your summer tomatoes from a local farmers’ market, I beg of you. What a bounty and burst on your tongue. My wish for you is that this song opens your heart up for a little joy, a few hours (days?) barefoot, no socks, wider possibilities and shapes for your food odes, and the taste of a summer day on your tongue. 

Natanya Pulley: “It’s In Our Hands” by Björk

I prefer the live version because of the choir of Inuit women—in particular the youtube live version, because you get to see the choir and it’s a better recording—but the studio version is also wonderful. Listening to Bjork always feels like entering an environment-–which is my favorite part of writing and reading as well. It’s not pure escapism, which allows us to disconnect and hurdle ourselves into a new realm, but living in the art is a commitment of the senses to be present in another’s voice, audio textures, and rhythms. I crave this and it is how I understand my own experience of writing. I chose “It’s In Our Hands” because of the layering of beats and the anaphoric returns it offers—the delightful surges and deep pulls of it. But also because of the possibility shared in the lyrics. We all need the hope that is inherent in seeking possibility—especially at a time when it is very easy either to escape to safer places in our minds or to churn in a political reality that seeks and has succeeded in dehumanizing sentient beings and sacred earths. I also suggest looking for the live version performed at the Royal Opera House in 2001 because of the performance’s joy and energy.

Ching-In Chen: “Sound Patterns” by Pauline Oliveros

I can think of no musician who had a greater influence on my time in Houston where I wrote the lyric essay “Elgin” (included in the book) than the musician and composer Pauline Oliveros. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening technique reflects my own method of paying attention to the landscape of my neighborhood, including the nighttime song of incessant frogs. Oliveros’ improvisational compositional strategies also deeply influenced some of my closest collaborators.

I chose “Sound Patterns,” created for a cappella mixed chorus in 1961, because of the movement that the work makes from white noise (created vocally using consonants “sh” and variations) to ring modulation (changing the vowel content) to percussive envelopes using the various instruments of the body (tongue clicks, snap fingers) and filtering through muting, as discussed in Heidi Von Gunden’s The Music of Pauline Oliveros. These techniques create transformations from section to section, a journey through the variation and mixing of techniques, much like the leaping between segments in the lyric essay.

Katrina Vandenberg: “The Long One” (medley, side two of Abbey Road) by The Beatles

The first time an editor asked me to write a 4,500-word essay for a magazine, I froze: that was nearly half the length of a book of poems. But I said yes, thinking that, even though I didn’t know how to write a piece that long, I knew how to write forty-five words one hundred times. From there I delved into the exciting process of figuring out how to sustain a lyric over longform. What worked for me was writing a series of fragments around my subject, knowing that I could eventually edit and arrange them to make a whole. I think of this process when I hear The Beatles’ arrangement of eight fragments, arranged into a cohesive sixteen-minute suite. I print out my fragments and arrange on my studio floor, using scissors and Scotch tape, and find the process satisfyingly analogue, like playing vinyl.

Julie Marie Wade: “On the Air” by Girlyman

In the final passage of my lyric essay “Third Door” (excerpted in the book), a disembodied voice, representing my parents speaking in unison, eschews the vision I’ve rendered of them as contestants on a game show during the time of their courtship in the mid-1960s: Come now, we were never On the Air. As it happens, several years after I wrote this essay, I bought all the CDs I could find by a band called Girlyman, a folk trio I had heard open for Dar Williams in Pittsburgh and whose sound and lyrics I loved. The first track on Girlyman’s album Little Star is fittingly titled “On the Air,” and even the sound of the song without the lyrics evokes the era of my lyric essay.

The speaker in the song is a game show host, disgruntled now in the new era of “On Demand.” He reminisces about the years of his televisual reign—”Back when Bob Hope was king / Back when every choice felt right / Back when life was black and white”—which hearkens to a time of certainty and (false) binaries that my parents also embraced. Lyric essays, of course, are about what happens after we surrender those black-and-white illusions, when color comes in—and with it, so much ambiguity and complexity regarding our identities, our choices, and our dreams.

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

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Seth Fleisher’s novel The Farther Shore is a deeply atmospheric and profound debut.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“A compelling novel inspired by the pioneering naturalist Eugène Marais and his son, Charles, who was abandoned in the name of science…This is an absorbing work of historical fiction and an impressive and welcome debut.”

In his own words, here is Seth Fleisher’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel The Farther Shore:

Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford said that the secret to being a successful novelist is never to have kids. (He didn’t put it precisely this way, but that’s always been my read of what he meant.) In any event, I have two. And at the time I started researching and then writing my debut novel, The Farther Shore, the two were on the smaller side. I also had a relatively full-time job with the World Bank Group that kept me busy and regularly traveling abroad. It struck me on more than one occasion that trying to write a book, raise great humans, and save the world might be mutually exclusive goals. Ten years later, having achieved two out of three feels like cause for celebration.

Every evening my wife and I took turns putting our kids to bed amid endless requests for one more song or one more book. Then, when they were finally settled, I’d steal away to Au Coquelet to work on the novel, alongside my regular late-night dinner order: a grilled chicken, mushroom, and jalapeño sandwich—an order that never got old—and a single pint of whatever happened to be on tap that night. Au Coquelet was one of the only establishments in downtown Berkeley open past midnight. Alas, it was also a COVID casualty—my favorite writing haunt has since been replaced by condos.

I rarely listen to music when I write. It distracts me from the rhythm and musicality I strive to build into prose. Plus, I have an internal playlist that rarely stops, even when I try my best to quiet it. 

Here are some of the internal tunes I recall being on replay in those early days, some directly relevant to the novel, and some, well, less so. 

Lake Street Dive: “Hypotheticals”

The novel begins with a hypothetical of sorts, or more precisely, a counterfactual: What if the protagonist had made one different decision? He might have salvaged a life. He might have saved his father.

Old Crow Medicine Show: “Methamphetamine”

That father—one of the two protagonists in the novel—is inspired by the historical South African naturalist Eugène Nielen Marais. In the novel, Marais is a morphine addict, as he was in real life. And while meth and morphine are drugs of completely different classes, the link feels salient. Plus the false cadence at the end of the chorus of this Old Crow tune still leaves me breathless each time I hear it. 

Jason Isbell: “Children of Children”

This Jason Isbell song is an exploration of inheritance: what parents unintentionally transmit to their children, and the baggage children carry without ever having consented. In the novel, Marais is so devastated by personal tragedy that he abandons his infant son and disappears into a remote African forest where he studies and lives among a troop of chacma baboons. He is intent on discovering the origins of memory as a way of understanding his own psychic suffering. Decades later, that son, Charles Marais, now a professor of Buddhist history at Harvard, finds himself trapped by his father’s research—which has been co-opted by university faculty for sinister ends—and constrained by his own genetics.

Fokofpolisiekar: “Hemel op die Platteland”

The first song in Afrikaans ever playlisted on 5FM, a national South African radio station. At the time, it enraged conservative Afrikaners. Fokofpolisiekar is an Afrikaans punk band whose chief project was tearing apart white Afrikaner nationalist and religious identity, dismantling notions of inheritance—as the novel also sets out to do.

Richard Wagner: “Kaisermarsch”

Okay, this was not actually part of my internal playlist. It’s the one composition on this list that appears in the novel. Wagner composed Kaisermarsch in 1871 to crown the new German Empire. In 1935, as Marais’s son gradually comes to realize that senior leaders at the university are flirting with Nazi ideology, he confronts a band of students performing this Wagner composition in Harvard Yard, and things get ugly.

The New Basement Tapes: “Kansas City”

Topically, this one is not directly related to the story. But when Marcus Mumford takes on Bob Dylan, the result is perhaps the greatest earworm in the history of roots music. After hearing Mumford play this one live, it didn’t leave my internal playlist for at least a year.

Johnny Clegg: “The Crossing (Osiyeza)”

 A white South African musician who croons in English and Zulu about crossing over to the other side, channeling western folk rock traditions while conjuring southern Africa. This theme of crossing over is embedded within the title of the novel, The Farther Shore. It comes from a curious line in the Buddhist Dhammapada: “Let go of the past, let go of the future, let go of the present and cross over to the farther shore.” For the novel’s protagonists, the crossings are both literal and metaphorical, as they travel the globe to find each other—and themselves.

Del McCoury: “I Need More Time”

A plaintive cry by one of the godfathers of bluegrass for more time to live. For me, it was a plea for more time to write. The two, I suppose, are not unrelated. But the song also forces us to consider how we choose to spend the shockingly few moments we have on this planet. Charles Marais, reflecting on this question, chooses to leave behind everything he’s built over decades in search of a more meaningful life.

Leonard Cohen: “Going Home”

Ultimately the novel is a story about the vast distances we’ll travel—across decades and continents—to find our way home. And Leonard Cohen merges Buddhist and Jewish identities with some of the most glorious poetry ever set to music: “He wants to write a love song / An anthem of forgiving / A manual for living with defeat.” Isn’t this also what Charles wants from his one precious and heartbreaking life? What all of us do?

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

Seth Fleisher is an American author whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Pearl, the Journal of Anthropological Research, and elsewhere. Based in Berkeley, California, he has worked with the World Bank Group and other NGOs in more than 40 other countries, and co-founded a U.S.-based democracy initiative to counter the rising tide of authoritarianism. A former Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka, Seth did Ph.D. work at Harvard in Buddhist social history, a fellowship at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and a B.A. in literature at Swarthmore, where he and his wife first met in a Chaucer seminar. The Farther Shore is his debut novel. You can visit him online at @sethfleisher and sethfleisher.com.

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