Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Sara Lippmann’s novel Hidden River is a powerful novel of trauma and friendship.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Crisp and unsettling…Readers will admire this gritty slice of life.”

In her own words, here is Sara Lippmann’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Hidden River:

Music plays throughout my novel, Hidden River. While the forward story unfolds over the summer of 2008, its emotional heart is lodged squarely in the mid ‘80s to early ‘90s, when any Gen Xer could tell you: music was life. Our spark plug, our deliverance. We lived at the mercy of the radio, lugged around our battery-operated portable tape decks smug with the technology of dubbing. We waited (and waited) for the DJs to play our songs. A Gen Xer can tell you their first purchased cassette (Foreigner’s 4), their first CD (Pearl Jam’s Ten), their coveted vinyl (The Who’s Tommy), their first heartfelt mixtape (from Robbie C. in 6th grade). Music not only lent shape to feeling, it was a driver, a reason to stand outside the record store in the rain for Kinks tickets, to plaster those Duran Duran pinups on our walls, to stare wide-eyed, slack-jawed into the glare of MTV.

For my narrator, Cass, who is being groomed by her friend Sally’s father, music is a sign and guide from the universe. “Waiting for a Girl Like You” – could it get any clearer? Popular hits are speaking directly to her, messaging her on sex and desire, affirming all that longing and possibility. What she understands, what she misunderstands, all of it, makes her feel less alone.

What we watched, what we heard, what we wore (courtesy of Lex Wexner) flooded the waters of complicity. I don’t merely mean the countless ways we were sexualized and objectified (as we belted out numbers like “Legs,” like “Girls”), but also made to feel adult male attention was normal, if not desirable. Stoned on Led Zeppelin we did not think about Jimmy Page’s 14-year-old girlfriend. Or if we did, if we thought about the swarms of teenage girls dripping on guitar arms, we chalked it all up to rock-n-roll.

And so, nothing fringe, nothing off the back wall here. This list is as mainstream, as omnipresent as it gets. Which is the whole kick. I dedicate it to Cass. To all the Cassandras.

Cassidy by the Grateful Dead

Although my narrator, Cassandra Trout, is named as much for Sweet Mama Cass as the Trojan princess who was disbelieved, Len Sellers, Sally’s father, nicknames her Cassidy after the song written by Bob Weir.

Unlike most of the other songs in this playlist, Weir’s lyrics are not sexual (the song was written about the birth of a friend’s daughter, Cassidy Law, with nods to the death of Neal Cassady of Kerouac and Merry Pranksters fame), and yet, Len anoints Cass with them – Ah, child of countless trees – infusing them with suggestion.

He will take her to the back room of Wonderland, the longstanding Philadelphia headshop (now closed) to scroll through the racks of concert bootlegs and Dead posters; he will take her to South Street to tattoo the lyric on her arm: what you are, what you’re meant to be, and he will take her to a show after graduation, in the parking lot of which he will take from her the one thing he hasn’t yet taken.

It is a song about two certainties: life and death. A song that pulses through Hidden River‘s pages as Len will die and Cass will become stuck in time, unable to free herself from her past trauma, to embrace her own future.

Private Eyes, Hall & Oates

To be at the whims of Philadelphia disc jockeys in these years meant being subjected to a lot of local favorites – the Hooters, Patti LaBelle, Daryl Hall & John Oates. The cheesy claps in this Billboard Top Hit make it feel cheerful, even innocent, but as Len slowly works his hooks into her, so much transpires in watching, waiting for a flicker of recognition, the silent exchange in a glance. The glimmers, the withholding. They’re watching you watching you watching you watching you. Desire, in abeyance. This is how obsession builds.

Panama by Van Halen

We’re talking the glory days of MTV. Eddie Van Halen’s winsome mug, the wild hair and zealous gyrations of David Lee Roth. “Panama,” written purportedly as an exercise in range, to show David Lee Roth could do more than strut among beach bodies singing about “California Girls,” is not really about a car at all. Reach down between my legs, ease the seat back. It is just the kind of blatant doubling inherent to grooming, and Len was adept at serving lines like this, that could pass in public, and vibrate with implication beneath.

Second Hand News by Fleetwood Mac

Speaking of cars, Len’s big hands on the wheel, percuss the dash – Lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff – as he drives Cass home one evening from a playdate with Sally.

Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

Len takes Cass and his daughter, Sally, to the Momentary Lapse of Reason concert tour at Vet Stadium in 1988. He gives them money for beers, for merch. Afterward, he watches in the rearview as the girls try on their new T-shirts. Again, the loadedness of a look. Again, the encouragement to all that adolescent pining. Two long souls swimming in a fish bowl – who hasn’t scrawled that on the brown paper bag covers of their biology textbooks?

Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen

Another artist beloved by Philly’s DJs, Bruce and Len share a passing resemblance: dark, curly, veined in the forearms. “I’m on Fire” might be the obvious choice, but who can forget Courteney Cox being brought up on stage in the video? Before we knew who Cox was, one could believe that she was a nobody plucked from the crowd, discovered in thousands of fans. Cass believes this. Cass believes she was picked by Len, selected, chosen. It makes her feel almost special.

Summer, Highland Falls by Billy Joel

At one point, Cass lays down a mixtape, ostensibly for Sally, but the rule of mixtapes is they’re as much (if not more) about the maker than the receiver. This is one of her curated tracks. It’s either sadness or euphoria.

Gonna Fly Now by Bill Conti

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Rocky soundtrack lands on every Philly athlete’s playlist. Cass wouldn’t call herself an athlete. She is a runner but not a competitor. She becomes a runner because Len is a runner. She remains a runner long after Len is no longer in the picture because running is the one thing she can do. This song lends flight to the flightless. It also happens to be just the right tempo for a few paced miles along the Schuylkill River.

Lithium by Nirvana

The day Senator Heinz’s small plane collides with a helicopter over Merion Elementary, killing everyone on board and two small children in the schoolyard, Cass and her friends hang out in a friend’s basement after last period, as if it’s a day like any other. Only thing, is they’re waiting for word from their friend’s missing little sister. It is April 4, 1991. The basement smells like worn socks. I’m not gonna crack.

Vive la Vida by Coldplay

In June 2008, Cass, at 35, is going nowhere fast. As the novel advances, as she slowly begins to process her trauma, the tethers to her past begin to loosen, to break down, enough for her to start moving forward. The hit of that summer, “Vive la Vida,” is a rallying cry for Cass to start living, which leads to her booking plane tickets to Sally’s extravagant wedding in late August.

Forever by Chris Brown

Abuse allegations against Brown would arise in 2009. In the summer of 2008 this song played rent free in our heads. Undoubtedly, it would’ve been cued up at Sally’s London wedding. It would have brought the whole party to their drunken feet. Once his abuse becomes known, does it stop anyone from listening? We know the answer to that.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Sara Lippmann’s playlist for her novel Lech

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

SARA LIPPMANN is the author of the novels Hidden River and Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, The Chicago Review of Books, The Lit Hub and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible (SUNY Press). She received a BA from Brown and an MFA from The New School, and has been teaching creative writing for over 20 years to people of all ages. She is a founding member of the Writing Co-Lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. You can visit her online at saralippmann.com.

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

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Alexa Yasemin Brahme’s novel Good News is a striking debut that thoughtfully explores the confluence of youth, art, and ambition.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Brahme’s appealing voice-driven debut finds Turkish art student Maggie Arif navigating a love triangle in New York City while struggling to complete an ambitious painting . . . Brahme’s character work is top notch.”

In her own words, here is Alexa Yasemin Brahme’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Good News:

While Good News mainly focuses on visual art, every facet of the art world has influenced the novel, and music is no exception. Though the main character is a painter, she gets her name from a fictional musician. Music plays in a few scenes to signify belonging and estrangement, tenderness and seduction. Specific songs even came to mind while crafting certain scenes and characters. What follows is an eclectic playlist that could make you cry or dance or say “what the fuck?” As with all good things, it ends with Cher.

Sensiz Yaşayamam by Ayla Dikmen

I absolutely had to include a dramatic Turkish ballad about lost love. Sensiz Yaşayamam translates to, “I cannot live without you,” and that is the exact kind of song that reduces Maggie’s mother to tears. In the novel, the main character Maggie, whose real name is Müjde, is named after one of these classic, beautiful Turkish singers who specialize in High Drama: I cannot live without you, your presence is warmer than the sun, my heart is empty, come back before my heart stops beating for you, etc. I love Turks. Long live their yearning.

Cherry, Cherry by Neil Diamond

There’s a scene early in the novel in which Maggie is in the car with her boyfriend Rob, and a very American song comes on the radio. Maggie can recognize that the song is famous but could never be counted on to know its name or the artist. Americans (Rob included), seem to know the words to this artist’s every song. Meanwhile, Maggie thinks Neil Diamond and Willie Nelson are the same person.

Big Time Sensuality by Björk

I say this with love and respect: I adore a freak. And I adore Björk! She is only listening to herself and her inner voice. This is something Maggie strives to do throughout the novel, and something the Artist (also a freak, a character who has denounced her name and simply goes by “the Artist”) does effortlessly. People may not understand the Artist or her antics, but they certainly respond to her. And the lyrics of this song feel apt for any artist who is trying to make it in their field: “It takes courage to enjoy it.”

Not to give anything away, but it’s moving to think of Maggie and the Artist when I hear the line, “Something huge is coming up/and we’re both included.”

Mujeriego by Ryan Castro

If Maggie’s ex-boyfriend Rakib had a theme song, it would be this. The lyrics loosely translate to, “I’m a womanizer, I can’t deny it, I steal a woman and say ciao, then go steal another.” But the song is so hot and fun that you just have to dance? Criminal, Ryan Castro. Rakib is a sexy, cruel mess who appears in the novel to ruin Maggie’s life. A runner-up theme song for him was Pimping All Over the World by Ludacris, which he would think was cool but is obviously insane.

Something About Us by Daft Punk

Speaking of Rakib… There’s something about him! There’s something about him with Maggie! “It may not be the right time, I might not be the right one. But there’s something about us I want to say, ’cause there’s something between us anyway.” Terrible that this is the case, considering Maggie is seriously dating Rob when Rakib pops back up. But when there’s “something about us,” it’s terrible to ignore.

Blue by Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell, the queen of sadness. This whole album could kill a person. I thought of it often while writing Maggie in the depths of her despair. There’s a scene when Maggie and Rob are going to sleep together, and Maggie says to Rob, “You’re blue,” cherishing the look of his face in the dark. She means literally, in the unlit room his skin is blue-ish. But she’s thinking of Joni. You’re blue, this is ruined, I’m sad, you’re sad, and it’s the blue kind of sad. Sadness forever. Brutal.

Águas de Março (Live) by Stan Getz & João Gilberto

Rob plays this song in an ultimate act of emotional warfare against Maggie toward the end of the novel. The two are growing apart, though neither can correctly pinpoint the reason why. In an attempt at tenderness, Rob plays this song in their apartment because it evokes their first years of dating, when things were simple and beautiful and easy. At least, that’s what it evokes for Rob. For Maggie, the song makes her think of the first time she’d ever heard it. She was nineteen, in her early days in New York—single, exploring herself and the city and men. She was standing at the precipice of her life, everything about to begin.

Memory Lane by Minnie Riperton & O Günler by Ferdi Özbeğen

Both of these songs are absolute perfection and are about those days. Those days in the past that are ossified in amber, inaccessible and beautiful and painfully distant. Minnie writes the American version and Ferdi writes the Turkish version and their vibes are…different. Memory Lane is such a beautiful song. She’s looking at a photograph and appreciating the beauty and love of a former flame. It’s not that sad and it’s a groove. Ferdi? That man may as well be weeping on the record.  He sings, “My whole lifetime got taken away from me just for the one day of happiness I had.” That’s the High Drama I mentioned earlier. I thought of both these songs when Maggie looks at a photograph of her and Rob and takes a bit of her own trip down memory lane.

Believe by Cher

Do you believe in life after love?

I do. Maggie does. Listen to this after finishing the book for the feeling that all worked out the way it was supposed to. Reject despair! There is life after love!

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

Alexa Yasemin Brahme is a writer from southern California. She received her MFA in fiction from The New School. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert J. Dau PEN Award, and Best of the Net. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is a bookseller at Books Are Magic. Good News is her first novel.

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

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Kyle McCarthy’s Immersions is one of the year’s most intense novels.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“A tender yet tense story of estranged sisters who grew up studying ballet . . . McCarthy writes astutely about dance as a double-edged sword that impassions the sisters but also damages them. The result is magnetic.”

In her own words, here is Kyle McCarthy’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Immersions:

As soon as I started writing Immersions I knew the bad boy of the novel would be named Johnny. All bad boys are named Johnny: all drifters, no-good charmers, and sweet, shiftless men.

Here, I imagine a scene not included in the novel: Johnny driving home from the city, thinking about one woman and then the next.

Boa Sorte (Good Luck) – Vanessa de Mata with Ben Harper

Johnny taps the steering wheel. He can sing the English, but not the Portuguese. This is a sexy song about separation, an irony he appreciates. He imagines the modern dancer from the city in the passenger seat. “This was a massive hit in Brazil,” he might tell her. “Really made Vanessa’s career.”

Upside Down – Diana Ross

But indulging in this daydream makes him feel foolish. And there is another dancer waiting for him at home. He’s enough of a feminist to feel bad about the two-woman situation, but not too bad. That’s why he turns on ‘Upside Down’ by Diana Ross. Sure, the song’s about cheating, but the beat is so bouncy that it’s easy to think the woman doesn’t mind that much. And isn’t it pleasant to imagine the dancer—either the one in the city or the one at home—singing this song to him?

Dance of the Seven Veils – Liz Phair

Stuck on the George Washington bridge, stuck in Ross’s loop, Johnny’s narcissism slowly curdles to self-loathing. That’s when he turns on Liz Phair. Singing along, he decides he’s John the Baptist. Phair’s Salome, the sexy dancer (he likes sexy dancers) who demands his head on a platter. Johnny my love / you’re already dead Phair intones, and this Johnny, alone in his Subaru, shivers.

Go Long – Joanna Newsom

But Johnny’s more than a middle-aged clown wallowing in self-disgust. There’s something complicated going on with his relationships with women, and in this haunting, ornate retelling of the fairy tale ‘Bluebeard,’ he hears the questions about secrets and space, the desire for privacy and locked doors, that he keeps asking himself. Why does his romantic past feel like so many bodies piled up in a room?

Swan Lake, Op. 20, Act Two: No. 10, Moderato – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Thinking about ex-girlfriends reminds him of Frances, the sister of his ex-wife. A month back he took her to a downtown restaging of this classic story ballet. Even the antics of the avant garde couldn’t undermine the beauty of Tchaikovsky’s score, the haunting famous melody he used to know how to play on the piano. He’s a man of culture, so he turns it on now.

Frances can play it, too. Her older sister taught her.

Fidelity – Regina Spektor

Charley. Charley the older sister. Now Johnny is cooking up I-95, and all the old ghosts are coming out. He’s thinking about his ex-wife Charley, and that time in the mid-aughts when they were so happy together. Sunday mornings she used to crank this song and bop around the kitchen, wagging her head to the chug of the chorus. Hitting eighty in the left lane, he sings Oh I never loved nobody fully / always kept one foot on the floor.

Like a car stuttering to a stop, like Spektor’s voice caught on that one word, heart—that’s how Johnny’s marriage ended.

Lonely Boy – Black Keys

All this nostalgia makes him squirmy. When he sees the sign for his exit, he pulls up this classic. Oh yes, Johnny is a lonely boy all right. Charley is now a nun. She locked herself away. She keeps him waiting.

Prince Johnny – St. Vincent

Almost there. Time for one last female rocker singing about our hero’s charms and faults. Johnny sings out his own name, pretending that St. Vincent knows him, they’ve done coke together in bathroom stalls, and she’s worried about him, she really is. She calls him kind, but not simple. She’s hoping that someday he’ll become a real boy.

Home, Johnny cuts the engine. He sits awhile in the car, listening to the cooling motor tick. Through the window he sees Frances. Make me a real boy, he whispers. I wanna mean more than I mean to you.

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

Kyle McCarthy is the author of the novel Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, and her fiction and essays have appeared in Best American Short Stories, American Short Fiction, n+1, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Ana Kinsella’s novel Frida Slattery As Herself is a spellbinding debut delivering poignant themes of art, power, and achievement.

Elif Batuman wrote of the book:

“Frida Slattery As Herself is a deft, profound, and seemingly effortless portrayal of how a series of artworks—as well as the personal and professional lives of the artists—takes shape over fifteen years, spanning the 2008 financial crisis, Me Too, and COVID. Ana Kinsella manages to deliver all the pleasures of a comic-romantic novel while thinking through a satisfying number of big themes: gender politics and financial precarity, the mysteries of artistic collaboration, and the relentless tug-of-war between freedom and security. Moving, thought-provoking, and utterly delightful.”

In her own words, here is Ana Kinsella’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Frida Slattery As Herself:

Music was so important to me while I was writing this book. Previously when I’d written fiction, I’d listened either to a lot of classical piano music, or else to minimal German techno, to try and sand down the edges of my mind. When I was writing my debut novel Frida Slattery As Herself, though, things were different. I was thinking about big beautiful pop music – the feelings of euphoria or heartbreak that a key change or a bridge can bestow on you, and the way the best pop music always takes you by surprise somehow. These were the facets of the medium that I wanted to work into my novel in some way. Here is a selection of songs that made a mark on me while I was writing and that wormed their way into the world of the novel as a result.

‘California’, CMAT

Would I have written this novel without CMAT? Impossible to tell. Certainly I rinsed her first two albums while working on Frida Slattery As Herself and got a lot from the densely self-referential way in which Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson seems to turn her own life into art. The lyrics of ‘California’ are posed as threat to an ex-lover – now that what we had is over, all I can do is turn this into art at your expense, in the same way we always talked about art when we were together. The outro is particularly pointed: ‘I’m writing up a book about us / They’re gonna make a movie of it / They’re gonna cast Jake Gyllenhaal / and I’m Kristen Schaal’. You would be scared, to hear this sort of thing from your talented ex, wouldn’t you? Your blood might even run cold.

‘The River’, Daisy Jones and the Six

I hadn’t read Taylor Jenkins Reid’s polyphonic novel based loosely on a Fleetwood Mac-style band recording a Rumours-style album when I wrote Frida Slattery As Herself, but early on, when I’d hit a bit of a wall, I watched the limited series starring Riley Keough as the eponymous Daisy Jones. It was huge fun, watching the creative process in all its abject horror and misery unfold, and the extremely jaunty soundtrack (composed by Blake Mills) was a wake-up call for me in how you can simply make up fake art for the purpose of your fiction. Writing a novel about an actor and a director inevitably involves doing exactly that, and listening on repeat to ‘The River’, which seems to be a mirror of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’, showed me that putting a little time and thought into your novel’s fake art can be immensely good fun and very worthwhile.

‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’’, Scissor Sisters

My novel starts in 2005 and carries on until 2022 and so much changes in the culture during those years. Early on in their relationship, Frida and John find themselves driving around Ireland for work reasons. I wrote so much more of this section that I went on to discard – doing so was part of my process for getting to know these characters better, and figuring out why they like each other. Those hours spent in the car together would be soundtracked by various things, I knew – whatever music they could agree on. Sometimes it’d be drivers’ choice, and sometimes I thought that Frida might hijack the controls and stick on a bit of Scissor Sisters to inject some levity into proceedings. Even the most esoteric and high-minded 2007 indie snob couldn’t resist shimmying his shoulders to this one.

‘Fisherman’s Blues’, The Waterboys

I think Mike Scott of The Waterboys is possibly the great poet of Irish yearning, other than WB Yeats. From the beginning, I wanted to write a novel in which the time the characters spend apart is as important for their relationship as the time they spend together. The ideas they form about each other in the absence of one another are as real to them as the other’s physical reality. This elegiac song isn’t even about being a fisherman and being sad on a boat – it’s about wishing you were a fisherman who was sad on a boat, because the distance it would put between you and your lover would become romantic and significant and beautiful. I love that idea of second-order yearning – maybe we yearn to yearn because doing so would make us feel alive.

‘Marquee Moon’, Television

This song comes on the jukebox in a bar in Manhattan at one point in the novel and it’s always struck me as a funny and obnoxious thing to put on a jukebox. It’s jerky and weird with mysterious lyrics and also, crucially, it’s ten minutes long. To subject other people to it in public, even though it is also a great song, is something of an imposition. It’s self-indulgent. In that way it reminded me a little of the kind of theatrical work that John Reddan makes, and of the process of sharing one’s work with the wider public in general.

‘A&W’, Lana Del Rey

For me Lana is the contemporary bard of Los Angeles and the only artist fit to soundtrack Frida’s Hollywood years. I love this song’s investigation of ageing, of fear and self-hatred, the visibility or otherwise of women’s pain, of the inevitability of needing love to make things better – all things that would be circling in Frida’s mind in the years she spends living and working in California.

‘Graceland’, Paul Simon

My husband once described this album to me as remarkable in how it takes the inner life of the middle-aged man and treats it as seriously as a young man’s inner life. Here’s Paul Simon in New York in his 40s, divorced from Carrie Fisher, trying to figure out who he is, newly obsessed with South African music. Deceptively simple lyrics that get to the heart of this strange time in his life, and that resonate now decades later even though my own life is objectively so different. A female friend of mine believes that a man’s 40s are the most potentially embarrassing time for him, and I really internalised this idea in my writing of John Reddan’s own confusing and at times painful 40s.

‘Revelator’, Gillian Welch

As Frida gets older, she gets to know herself better – as we all do, I hope! Part of this involves leaning into the things she loves most, not trying to adapt herself into shapes and forms to fit other people. I imagine that could be a little difficult for an actress. One thing she loves is folk and country music by women with sad voices. Gillian Welch’s voice has always sounded otherworldly to me, a voice out of time and place. The first time I heard this song I felt entirely thrown, like something in me had been shifted permanently by the movement of tectonic plates. I love the idea of Frida Slattery alone in her flat some quiet evening, a bottle of wine open, a candle lit, and this astoundingly beautiful album by Gillian Welch playing on a speaker.

‘Hunting the Wren’, Lankum

I started writing this novel when I’d just moved back to my hometown Dublin after over a decade in the UK. When I got home, Lankum were everywhere. This song in particular became a talisman as I wrote – it’s haunting and a little scary, and you could call its lyrics a sort of feminist retelling of a forgotten part of Irish history and culture. Traditionally men and boys in parts of Ireland have made sport of hunting this tiny bird on 26^th December, ostensibly for charity, wearing elaborate straw costumes. Lankum’s song weaves this violent tradition with another real story of the ‘wrens’, 19^th century Irish women who had fallen from acceptable society in various ways. I liked the idea of Frida and John, separate but both in different parts of Dublin once again, listening to the same song without realising it.

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

Ana Kinsella is an Irish writer based in Dublin. As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian, Frieze, Dazed, n+1, AnOther, and others. Her first book, Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City, was published by Daunt Books in 2022.

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

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Andrew Dana Hudson’s novel Absence is magnificently inventive and original.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“Hudson (Our Shared Storm) gives a skillful metaphysical twist to a tale of apocalyptic horror in this strikingly original novel. Its setting is a near-future America devastated by “popping” . . . The thoroughness with which Hudson imagines how individuals and society would have to rewire themselves to contend with this bizarre phenomenon lends his tale impressive philosophical heft.”

In his own words, here is Andrew Dana Hudson’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Absence:

Like a lot of writers, I’m distractable. Scare quotes “Attention Deficit.” Nothing is harder sometimes than just sitting down and writing the thing I am so desperately excited to write—especially when the world gets chaotic and nasty outside. Music is a tool I use to block out the metaphorical and literal noise.

A lot of the time I write to music that’s designed to operate in the background. Soundtracks from movies, TV, video games. Light on lyrics, long on vibes. I spent weeks of work on my novel listening to endless loops of “Mercenary Tribunal” from the Disco Elysium soundtrack by Sea Power, or “Been Good to Know Ya” from Cyberpunk 2077. I’m not exactly breaking new ground here with this strategy, but it works for me.

The protagonist in my novel Absence, Harvey Ellis of the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, would be a pretty steady, focused guy if his world weren’t so weird. People are vanishing into thin air, one by one, and it’s his job to do the paperwork that comes after one of these “pops.” There’s a staccato rhythm to this phenomenon that keeps Harvey on his toes throughout the book. Harvey would love to be able to lock in, if he didn’t have to keep an ear out for pops.

A good bit of the novel is spent driving, cruising around a noir-dark, half-depopulated Kansas landscape, Harvey and his partner Shonda Erins trying to puzzle out the mystery of Gabriela Reyes, the returned woman. So when I think about the music of this book, I think of the music Harvey and Shonda might have listened to while driving, looking out the window. Here a dead barn in a field gone fallow, there a vast, automated robo-farm. The Great Plains have a lot of space to get lost in.

Absence is divided into eight parts, six of them each covering a single day. I’ve picked out eight songs, one to set the vibe for each part.

Part 1: “Yellow Flicker Beat” by Lorde

A book full of people popping out of existence needs to lead off with a pop song. Lorde has long been one of the pop artists I’ve found most interesting, and the darker tones of her earlier works are perfect for this novel. This song might have originally premiered as part of a Hunger Games movie soundtrack, but twelve years later I think it’s fair game for another semi-dystopian thriller to try it on. “This is the start / of how it all ends,” Lorde sings in the chorus, and isn’t it just.

Part 2 – Tuesday: “Freakin’ Out on the Interstate” by Briston Maroney

Harvey and Shonda’s case begins with a long drive from Kansas City out to the middle-of-nowhere town of Dawnville, a disgraced former ‘Safe zone.’ Harvey is eager to spend time alone with this impressive agent, who recently took him into her bed. I like the way this Midwest emo track has the lazy, giddy-anxious vibes of taking a road trip with a crush. Harvey isn’t quite freaking out — but he will be once they get to Dawnville and meet the enigmatic Gabriela Reyes.

Part 3 – Wednesday: “Can I Live” by Jay-Z

On the second day of their investigation, Harvey wakes up to the TV scrolling news of the night’s notable Absences, including celebs like Kevin Bacon and Jay-Z. Just another day at the end of the world, and Shonda jokes that they should listen to the rapper’s debut album Reasonable Doubt. I like to think the pair of them might resonate the most with the eighth track, “Can I Live.” This is Jay-Z at about his most moody, philosophical, fatalistic. “We hustle out of a sense of hopelessness,” Jay intones in the intro, but by the end he’s “meditated like a Buddhist.” Harvey spends a lot of the book wrestling with similar feelings.

Part 4 – Thursday: “The Mother Road” by Chelsea Wolfe

This is a song for narrative turning points. Slow building, a strumming guitar gradually gets overpowered by a heavy drumbeat. This is the point in the novel when sides start to be chosen, lines drawn. “Guess I needed something to break me / Guess I needed something to shake me up.” Harvey realizes that, whatever happens in this case, it’s going to change him.

Part 5 – Friday: “Night Bell (Arizona)” by Kerala Dust

Suspicions start to bubble up from old mud. How do you know if you’re the cat or you’re the mouse? In this upbeat, dance-y track (parenthetically titled after my state of residence), roles are up for grabs: “lover,” “liar,” “preacher,” “fool.” At this point in the novel, trust is wearing thin, and Harvey is wondering who in his life is going to turn out to be which.

Part 6 – Saturday: “Dark Allies” by Light Asylum

In every good thriller, there’s a moment where it all goes to shit. The heroes are on the run, bad guys closing in, hands are forced, unwise ideas go out on patrol. No spoilers, so I’ll just say I like this track both for its car chase-worthy tempo and its resonant lyrics: “Inherit the Earth where / no words are spoken / and the sky like a veil / was our wounds torn open.”

Part 7 – Sunday: “Peacefield” by Ghost

At the end of Harvey and Shonda’s long, bad week, their returned woman takes everyone to church. What better soundtrack for the climactic convergence of cults, crazies, and maybe-false messiahs than Ghost. The faux-satanic metal band is a house favorite of ours, and my partner and I see them every time they come through town. “We all need something to believe in,” sings the Pope-like Papa Perpetua, with just the right amount of bittersweet cynicism. Ain’t that the truth.

Part 8: “River” by Leon Bridges

I love this soulful track of beautiful, gospel surrender. When I teach yoga, a side hustle for me for six years, I often use this as the closing song, the one that brings us out of the silence of corpse pose. Looming over the whole book is a question of resisting the cosmic unknown or accepting it, stepping into it for the sake of getting answers to greater mysteries. The refrain in this song repeats “I wanna go” and “wanna know” over and over again. Harvey wants to know so bad, but is he ready to go? Here at the end, he has to make that choice once and for all.

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

Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher, teacher, and critical futurist. He is the author of Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures and dozens of short stories and essays appearing in venues like Slate, Lightspeed Magazine, Long Now Ideas, and Jacobin—as well as his newsletter, www.solarshades.club. He lives in Arizona, where he teaches writing, futures thinking, and yoga.

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

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Alicia Kennedy’s memoir On Eating is a thoughtful and wise meditation on a life through the lens of food.

Hetty Lui McKinnon wrote of the book:

“If her book No Meat Required and her laser-sharp writing on her weekly newsletter hadn’t already proved it, On Eating emphatically confirms Alicia Kennedy as one of the food industry’s most thoughtful thinkers. Kennedy’s prose is alive, tactile, and at times heartbreaking, a delicious and evocative exploration of how the food we consume shapes how we view ourselves and the world around us, and vice versa. I devoured every word.”

In her own words, here is Alicia Kennedy’s Book Notes music playlist for her book On Eating:

On Eating is a memoir of my life and appetite, along with the political and cultural stories around the food. It has a 75-song “soundtrack” and these are 11 selections that correlate to different times (I’ve always thought 11 songs is the right number for an album). I have a DJ past, and the soundtrack was a way for me to add new layers of subtext to the writing. The reasons the songs are on the soundtrack are often so much more intimate than the text could be, by virtue of the restraints of food memoir. I like that even though I’m being so much more personal in this book than in any of my other writing, that there’s more to dig into between the lines if you listen along.

“Born at the Right Time,” Paul Simon

In transparency, I originally wanted to start the soundtrack with “You Can Call Me Al” because it was such an important music video in my childhood: It taught me what “funny” is, and I’ve returned to Graceland in my older years as it’s only gained relevance to me. But I didn’t want anyone to think they actually could call me Al—a possibility, given my first name—so I went with this tune, which is probably a more perfect origin.

“If,” Janet Jackson

The Janet. Tour at Jones Beach was my first-ever concert when I was 9 years old. We were seated in the nose bleeds but I’ll never forget when I found out my uncle got us tickets: I let out a huge scream. I listened to the cassette on my TalkBoy while daydreaming in the backyard. Janet is always my pop star par excellence.

“Discoball World,” David Garza

I don’t think there’s a song that better represents my tween years because I loved it and the whole album so much, and the lyrics gave me a picture of adulthood that I wanted. “Coffee eyes,” “vodka vases”—I’m still one of the world’s biggest Davíd Garza fans, I’m pretty sure. My tween years were defined by an obsession with dude singer-songwriters wielding guitars, but he’s special.

“Moments Have You,” John Fruscinate

John Frusciante’s To Record Only Water for Ten Days is one of my favorite albums of all time and soundtracked the summer of 2002 for me, when I was 16. I saw the video for “Going Inside” on TV but couldn’t remember his name so I scrolled for hours on some website that listed every musician ever looking for this long last name that began with “F,” and then I had to reform my hatred of the Chili Peppers. Frusciante solo is peak: Him and the Mars Volta were on heavy rotation in my car CD player through college.

“Teenage Dreams,” Nada Surf

It’s a little bit of a joke to anyone who knows me that I’m a Nada Surf superfan. I see them whenever they play in New York; I’ve driven to Asbury Park, New Jersey, to see lead singer Matthew Caws solo; I listen to every album as it comes out and commit them to heart. Caws’s lyrics are, I’m afraid, like prescient self-help to me, guiding me as I get older. “Teenage Dreams” spurred me along in a weird and wild vegan microbakery detour in my mid-twenties—it lasted just a year but has defined the trajectory of my life ever since.

“I Am the Past,” Eleanor Friedberger

A big breakup really marks my late transition into a fun, partying kind of adult life and this song, along with the whole album, was so key to processing the feelings for me. I love Friedberger’s humor, which never takes away from the real emotion. She gave a lot of shape to my new womanly existence.

“Boyfriend,” Slowdance

This was a track they used to play at an indie pop dance party called Mondo that I started to frequent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—a small room filled with ecstatic joy that introduced me to so much music and made me feel part of the world in a way I’d always dreamed of being. It also encapsulates my post-breakup feelings of wanting only newness.

“The Only Thing,” Sufjan Stevens

Carrie and Lowell helped me through my brother’s passing. One day I lit a candle for him in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and decided to walk all the way downtown to meet friends, and I passed Sufjan on the street. Or at least, I’m pretty sure I did. He’s the patron saint of that time in my life, and this song is exactly how I felt every single day—probably still how I feel.

“De Música Ligera,” Soda Stereo

My time reporting on Puerto Rico’s agriculture and culinary scenes before I ended up moving to San Juan deepened a love of rock en español forged in high school by La Ley’s MTV Unplugged, and I became obsessed with Soda Stereo’s Gustavo Cerati—a true king of rock and roll who should be known and beloved by all, regardless of whether they understand the lyrics. This is the band’s biggest song, the one any visiting artist to Argentina covers, and it makes me feel so much joy. My eventual husband would put it on any time I got stressed when we were first dating.

“L’aérotrain,” Exsonvaldes

A song that has soundtracked the last few years of my writing life with a prominent place on the playlist I put on whenever I really have to focus (called “the Vibe”). It’s in French, and I’ve found so much French-language music to love while studying the language, and as with Spanish, the love for the music may or may not be to the detriment of my actual learning.

“4 Degrees,” ANOHNI

On Eating ends by considering the future of the planet and the loss of coffee, as well as increasing water stress. It’s a dark note that I try to make hopeful in the writing. I think honesty about the true costs of climate change is needed, and I hope more artists will tackle it as beautifully as ANOHNI did here.

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

Alicia Kennedy is a writer from New York based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her weekly newsletter on food culture, politics, and media, “From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy,” has been mentioned by TheNew York Times, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, W, Food52, Coveteur, and Vogue Australia. Her writing has appeared in Eater, British Vogue, The Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar. Kennedy has appeared on Good Morning America, the BBC World Service, and many more radio shows and podcasts to talk about issues of food media, culture, and meat consumption.

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

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

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

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

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

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

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

1. Our Years of Magical Thinking

“Atalaya” by Dezron Douglas

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

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

2. Mythologizing Disaster

“Tamir (for Tamir Rice)” by Jaleel Shaw

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

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

3-5. Souvenirs of Climate Catastrophe

“Ptah, the El Daoud” by Alice Coltrane

“Afro Blue” by McCoy Tyner

“A l’ecoute du moro” by Ablaye Cissok

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

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

6. How to Fly Kites

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

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

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

7. The Language of Birds

“Birds Canticum” by Dhafer Youssef

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

8. Lamb

“Breaths” by Sweet Honey in the Rock

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

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

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

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

also at Largehearted Boy:

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

Anna Badkhen’s playlist for her book Walking with Abel

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

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

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

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

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

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

Music inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody came.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I eat the city.

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

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

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

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

The compassion that we are losing so fast?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

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

Edward Hirsch wrote of the book:

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

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

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

Home by Six Organs of Admittance

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

Teenage Spaceship by Smog

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

Banshee Beat by Animal Collective

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

You Can Make Me Feel Bad by Arthur Russell

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

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

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

Do Your Best by John Maus

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

Envelop by Julianna Barwick

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

I Heard You Looking by Yo La Tengo

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

I Shall Love 2 by Julia Holter

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

Coney Island Baby by Lou Reed

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

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

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

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

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

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Candice Wuehle’s novel Ultranatural an immersive pageturner, a captivating story of friendship and fame.

Sadie Dupois wrote of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“9 to 5” – Dolly Parton

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

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

“Atlantic City” – Bruce Springsteen

“I got debts no honest man can pay.”

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

“Born to Run” – Bruce Springsteen

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

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

“I Won’t Back Down” – Tom Petty

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dorothea” – Taylor Swift

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

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

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

“Work Bitch” – Britney Spears

“You better work, bitch.”

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

“Oh No!” – MARINA

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Golden G String” – Miley Cyrus

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

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

also at Largehearted Boy:

Candice Wuehle’s playlist for her novel Monarch

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

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

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