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.

Ankur Thakkar’s novel Blow Yourself Up is a provocative and compelling debut.

The Chicago Review of Books wrote of the book:

“Blow Yourself Up is a love story for our modern times, exploring the ways in which the internet dazzles and destroys us with humor and humanity”

In his own words, here is Ankur Thakkar’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Blow Yourself Up:

Blow Yourself Up features a young music prodigy, Arjun, who can pick up almost any instrument with ease and uses his talent to win the heart of his first love, Payal. A gift like that can seduce you into thinking it’s what you’re supposed to do with your life, and Arjun goes on to play in bands and try to make it as an artist as Payal becomes a popular creator on a looping video app. Music is core to this novel, and although I mostly listen to ambient music while writing, these are the songs that make up its DNA, freckled with nostalgia but facing the future.

American Football – “Never Meant”

We must begin with Midwest emo. I worked at Vine for a few years and the last one I made, shortly before the platform died, featured a seamless audio loop of this song’s perfect guitar riff. It was my first attempt to say goodbye to a community I loved. My second attempt was Blow Yourself Up. One strategy at closure is to pretend it was never meant to be, because if you pretend for long enough, maybe it will become true.

Lorde – “400 Lux”

The novel begins and ends in a car, with two characters in close proximity, communicating without really speaking but maybe through music or a touch. Having grown up in a suburb, so many of my core memories growing up were on drives like this, whether there was a clear destination or not, because it was just important to learn how to waste time together.

Bloc Party – “Blue Light”

Another post-breakup banger that, like many Bloc Party songs, is structured like an effective novel. You have the narrator finding memories in small spaces, the quiet realization that everything has changed, the drums picking up as the stakes get bigger and the narrator goes further and further inward to a climactic release that feels like the space love fills when it’s no longer there.

Diljit Dosanjh – “Morni”

There’s this moment that happens at too many parties where the DJ puts on “Mundian to Bach Ke” aka “Beware of the Boys” ft. Jay Z, the ubiquitous Punjabi track, and everyone’s attention turns to the nearest brown person with expectant eyes, expecting us to do that shoulder dance. There are so many other Punjabi songs! I’m grateful for the recent explosion of artists like Raf-Saperra and Sidhu Moose Wala may he rest in peace. At the current helm is Diljit, the first Punjabi artist to sell out Madison Square Garden and creator of a viral dance when we performed this song on The Tonight Show earlier this year. Bhangra and Punjabi music play a strong role in Blow Yourself Up’s plot, and it was incredible to see the real world mirror its rise. Punjabi aa gaye oye.

Metric – “Calculation Theme”

One of the ideas I wanted to engage with was the impressions we leave online that have lives of their own, like we’re creating our own ghosts. It’s that feeling of stumbling upon a platform you stopped posting to a decade ago, and scrolling through who you used to be, even though it’s all in present tense. Or how reading through a dormant conversation with an ex can still feel so alive. This song’s outro introduces two ghosts continuing a conversation between lovers no longer in touch, asking: “who put these bodies between us?”

Kanye West – “All Day”

Yes, but hear me out. Of course this novel was influenced by Chicago’s patron saint. There’s a defiance in Payal and Arjun that, for better or worse, affects who they become. Internet culture invented the troll, something both of them grapple with, and this song is the epitome of a troll, a manifesto, and a meme all at once. It goes so much harder than it needs to.

Djo – “End of Beginning”

And speaking of Chicago, what an amazing place to make art. Joe Keery attended DePaul and made music before getting famous, and there is something about being in Chicago in your twenties that makes it impossible to not get wistful about. This city gives you so many opportunities to interact with other artists without hierarchy. Chicago is obviously not without its deep systemic issues, and it was important to me to try and capture what makes it so special in this novel.

Swet Shop Boys – “Benny Lava”

This was the first release from brown boyband supergroup Himanshu ‘Heems’ Suri and Riz Ahmed. The pair strike a perfect transatlantic tension between their raps and I hope they make another album soon. Riz recently brought Heems on in an episode of his incredible show Bait, so I think it’ll happen. I was fortunate enough to begin Blow Yourself Up with an epigraph from Heems, which is perfect because every time I sit down to write I whisper the first line of his verse and lock the fuck in.

The Strokes – “What Ever Happened?”

I moved from Chicago to Williamsburg long after the post-9/11 rock scene dissipated, but a walk through town could lead you to The Levee, formerly Kokies, which was dubbed “Cokies” by the East Village kids that would walk across the bridge to partake. Down the street is The Four Horseman, the award-winning wine bar by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. The aughts also brought the tech platforms to the neighborhood and, along with it, the high rises, the Kickstarter headquarters which is now a hype house for TikTok creators, and the Sephora/Whole Foods/WeWork/Slop Bowl Industrial Corridor. It’s not ever clear what’s happening in the moment, but the wisdom of years is important to this novel, to ask “who’s culture is this and does anybody know?”

Radiohead – “Everything in its Right Place”

There is a scene where Arjun is describing to Payal how music feels in his mind, like patterns that map to emotions and memories. I haven’t listened to this song, or to Kid A, in years because I know how much it will affect me, as if by not listening to it I can preserve its power for when I need it most. Actually, the last time I listened to Kid A in its entirety was exactly twenty years ago. I was sitting in the empty McCarren Park Pool waiting for The Shins to come on stage and the DJ decided to just play Kid A in full. I don’t know why but it remains, to this day, the most profound concert experience I’ve ever had, and the band wasn’t even there. When you work on a novel for more than a decade, speculative elements can become embodied, or like an alternate history of what the future almost was, could still be, which is exactly how this song feels.

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

Ankur Thakkar is a multimedia artist and the author of the novel Blow Yourself Up. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2025 and his writing has appeared in Guernica, PANK, and TriQuarterly. Medium selected his piece, “Swipe,” as one of the best personal essays about the internet. His artwork has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo and La Friche la Belle de Mai. He chose MFA, then NYC, and lives in Brooklyn.

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.

Regina McBride’s novel The White Deer is an imaginative look into the lives of Anton Chekhov and Vera Denisova.

Roxana Robinson wrote of the book:

“Regina McBride’s new book evokes a loving nostalgia for a place we’ve never known—Chekhov’s Russia. Set in the summer of young Anton’s twentieth year, the novel centers on a young woman whose family is losing financial control of their estate—an estate famous for its orchards. Anton is the guest of a neighboring doctor, and the two young people become entwined in a romantic friendship—une amitiée amoureuse. McBride’s story comes at Chekhov’s from the side, presenting us not only with the family’s eccentric and complicated history, but the vision of the author himself, as a character in the work. A beautiful and eloquent rendering of a place and time we somehow feel is ours.”

In her own words, here is Regina McBride’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The White Deer:

Scheherazade Opus 35, Rimsky-Korsakov
Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir of the Conservatory of Music
(opening measures)

A magical, at times emotional and playful symphony based on the stories of One Thousand and One Nights.

Anton, a visitor to the area, a guest of the local doctor, comes upon Vera when she is weeping convulsively. At first, through her tears, she cannot see him clearly in the doorway, but his voice has the same timbre and depth as her departed lover, Petya’s voice, who she is crying over. Anton leaves her to her privacy, but she seeks him out in a few minutes. Right away there is a kind of recognition between them and their first conversation becomes lightly flirtatious and at moments playful. Vera is charmed by this young man who asks to walk her back to Volkhov, the nearby estate belonging to her aristocratic family.

Song of the Indian Guest, Rimsky-Korsakov
Symphonic version (not the operatic)
(go directly to the melody, which comes up pretty quickly)

A hypnotic and unforgettable melody. In the opera, Sadko, a remarkable guest tells a party of people about his homeland.

Anton, the outsider at Volkhov, describes his childhood to a gathering of aristocrats over a meal. He came from a poverty-stricken background, which he does not try to hide. He is polite, maybe at times excessively so. He has a natural sense of decorum and believes that the mark of a refined person is kindness and consideration. Though his father was born a Serf, Anton is engaged and engaging and feels comfortable among aristocrats. And he is, by most, appreciated.

Afternoon of the Faun (Prelude a lApres-Midi d’un Faune), Claude Debussy
Leopold Stokowski with the Leopold Stokowski Symphony Orchestra
(begin at 5:20 and go as long as you can)

Stokowski called this piece “a miracle of delicate, erotic beauty, suggesting a dream world of pagan loveliness”.

A white deer has been spotted on the back acreage at Volkhov. Anton tells Vera that it is great luck to see a white deer because it represents future happiness and offers the opportunity to exchange an old life for a new one. They make it their mission to see the deer and spend many days alone for long hours in each other’s company, wandering the meadows and forests. Under these idyllic conditions a romantic friendship evolves. When, surreptitiously through Anton, Vera learns that the trees of her beloved childhood estate are destined to fall under the axe, their long hours spent together in nature become bittersweet and take on a certain urgency. They fantasize about stopping time.

In the Grove by the Danube (Ukrainian Folk Song)

Oh, in the grove by the Danube
A Nightingale chatters
To all the birds of his flock
To his nest, he’s calling…

Vera’s mother, Pelegaya, loves to sing old Ukrainian folksongs, though she does not always stay in tune. Still, Vera loves to listen to her mother sing, especially this song, which was her favorite when she was small.

Vera’s mother and older sister, Sasha, share a secret that Vera is left out of. Vera only knows that it is something terrible and related to the time her mother spent in Siberia where her older sister was born. Siberia hangs over everything in this story as a place of terror and loss. The Ukrainian folk songs are from her mother’s childhood before Siberia destroyed her family and her mind.

Marriage Song (Russian folk song)
Russian State Symphony Cappella

It is performed in Russian but here are the lyrics translated to English.

Here, everything has passed,
I am already under the wedding crown.
They have bound the young man
With a golden ring.

Only, it is not with you,
My dear one.
You are sleeping beneath the earth,
Sleeping because of me.

The song is written from the perspective of a man who is standing at the altar marrying someone else, while the woman he truly loved has tragically died (and he blames himself for her death).

Vera’s father pines for his wife (Vera’s mother), whose room he has been banished from for over a decade, and sings phrases of this song abstractedly as he walks along. These lyrics are often on his mind.

Nocturne 1, Clouds, Claude Debussy
Leopold Stokowski with the London Symphony Orchestra
(begin at 1:20)

Debussy said that this particular piece was meant to offer the impression of “the immutable aspects of the sky, the slow, solemn motion of the clouds fading away in gray tones lightly tinged with white”.

As Vera and Anton spend comfortable hours in each other’s company, wandering the forests and meadows of Volkhov looking for the white deer, they often enjoy introspection and silences that forge their closeness and lead to sharing confidences. This music suggests that slow drifting of thoughts.

Scheherazade Opus 35, Rimsky-Korsakov
Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir of the Conservatory of Music
(0boe at 11:53)

Vera is still often overcome with longing for the missing Petya, but she finds that Anton has begun to eclipse him. Vera tells Anton that he looks a lot like Petya, that he is just a little taller and his hair is darker, that Petya has blue eyes and Anton has brown. She tells him that the two are very different in personality but physically they are alike. “You both have the same heavy eyelids. Even when you are wide awake you look a little sleepy.” This observation seems to give Anton pleasure, and he loves the idea that Vera’s beloved Petya may be his doppleganger.

Vera has a drawing that Petya had done of her half naked. She imagines handing it to Anton and watching as he unrolls it. She imagines his silence as he looks at it, his eyes flashing to meet hers. “The drawing had left its gray silvery dust on my fingertips. And if Anton held it, if he unrolled it and touched it, it would leave the same gray, silvery dust on his.”

Bayu Bayushki Bayu

Anton sings this old traditional lullaby to Vera’s belly when she believes she’s pregnant.

Bayu-bayushki-bayu is a traditional Russian lullaby that warns a child not to sleep on the edge of the bed so a grey wolf will not grab them. Many traditional lullabies used scary elements to make sure children stayed safe and still in bed. It is an interesting combination of comforting and frightening.

from Six Consulations, Franz Liszt
Beatrice Berrut
(begin at 1:29)

Vera comes across her mother’s friend, Maxima Gabinskaya, a woman who dresses with a masculine flair and at one time played piano with the Petersburg Philharmonia, playing this piece in the empty downstairs ballroom. Vera appeals to her mother’s friend to reveal the secret at the heart of her mother and sister’s lives.

Tchaikovsky’s 5^th Symphony, Second movement
Russian Philharmonic

After the summer spent together, Vera and Anton correspond as their lives undergo profound changes.

It was Anton’s staunch belief in Vera’s gift as an actress that encouraged her to pursue a life in the theatre.

When Vera learns of Anton’s death from tuberculosis at forty four, she rereads all the letters he sent her since that idyllic summer. As she grieves the loss of Anton, she sees how the intimacy they shared continued throughout his life to have meaning for him. He based his final play, his masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard, on the summer he spent with Vera at Volkhov.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Regina McBride’s playlist for her novel Stranger From Across the Sea

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

Regina McBride is the author of eight books. The White Deer: A Novel of Anton Chekhov is her sixth novel. She is also the author of one memoir, Ghost Songs, and one book of poetry. Her novel The Nature of Water and Air was a Booksense Pick (Independent Book Stores Selection), a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers book, and a Borders Original Voices choice. It was optioned for a film. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she lives in New York City, where she taught fiction writing for thirty years at Hunter College and continues to teach privately.

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.

Jody Chan’s poetry collection Madness Belongs to the People is poignant and inventive in its use of language as both weapon against oppression and tool for understanding.

Gabrielle Bates wrote of the book:

“Like Tyehimba Jess’s Olio or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Jody Chan’s Madness Belongs to the People enlivens, with its interactive and interdisciplinary elements, the possibilities of what a book of poems can do and be. Taking madness as a series of guiding energies, formal possibilities, and generative constraints, these stirring, participatory poems are wise, layered, and full of gifts to such an extent I find myself finishing the collection eager, immediately, to reread them all. This erudite, passionate work evidences a deeply embodied politicization that understands, in relation to liberatory movements, both the powers and limits of language. Here are words that touch you, singing: ‘may language move you to action.’”

In their own words, here is Jody Chan’s Book Notes music playlist for their poetry collection Madness Belongs to the People:

Madness Belongs to the People exists as a book, as well as an accompanying ambient electronic album composed by the percussionist (and my friend) Yang Chen. What does madness sound like? For us, this question was a literal one, its answers including: organ, wood block, pearl barley, bass drum, bowed cardboard, knifed glass, ripped newsprint, and other unimaginable instrumental combinations, sometimes all at once. For writers like Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, and Bedour Alagraa, whose work underpins these poems, the question is also theoretical. Harney and Moten: How do we locate the wild beyond — a space of ungovernable noise, rather than regulatory sound — that already exists through our practices of stealing life back from professionalized institutions? Bruce: “How might music in madtime enhance our playlists for protest and soundtracks for revolution?” Alagraa: How do we “break the metre” of colonialism, slavery, and their legacies in Western liberalism? Not all the music on this playlist is easy listening, let’s say. But all of it is doing beautiful (or even better, weird) things with time and texture and silence.

“endless”, oklou (2025)

A soft entry to this playlist, and the inside of my writing mind. Glitchy scratches and submelodic rumbles. Also kind of a synecdoche: I listened to this whole album *endless* times during my final stages of revision, in addition to oklou’s “choke soundscape” NTS show, a languorous, loopy, low-percussion landscape of her own musical inspirations while writing the album. A nesting doll of sonic influences! I always mishear one of the lyrics, “is the endless still unbound”, as “is the endless still inbound.” Or maybe it’s the other way around. She’s said in interviews that the lyrics aren’t the most important part of the music.

“Freedom Time (Live)”, Ms. Lauryn Hill (2002)

“There’s a war in the mind over territory for the dominion,” Lauryn Hill says, “who will dominate the opinion,” her voice breaking, the guitar straining. “We have to give ourselves over to a certain kind of craziness,” said Halberstam, in his introduction to Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons. “No artist that has widespread appeal is supposed to say this stuff. That’s why they called her crazy,” said @randomfools808 in this song’s YouTube comments. What else is there to say about madness as a tactic to counter cultural hegemony? Nothing! So I wrote a 120-page book about it! Fiery darts thrown by the workers of the arts!

“silt”, Yang Chen (2022)

Yang’s debut album is an archive of Covid lockdown longing. Each track in longing for _ is the result of an idiosyncratic collaborative process. They missed their friends! So they asked the friends to write music for them to play! Some pieces came to Yang fully formed, others as a sparse textual score, requiring their interpretation. “silt”, composed by and performed with Sara Constant, is the track that made me know I wanted to collaborate with Yang too. You can hear some of the same new music improvisational techniques and dissonant textures on the Madness album. Mad, genius. Watch the music video, directed by Serville Poblete and starring Esther Phua and Luisana Reyes, for some dialled-up, hair-splayed-on-the-floor, running-hands-along-the-hallway extra crazy energy.

“Dysfluent Waters”, JJJJJerome Ellis (2021)

Here’s the centrepiece. All of JJJJJerome Ellis’ work, really. Aster of Ceremonies, The Clearing, Vesper Sparrow. I had so many conversations with Yang about the relationship between text and sound, which was meant to subordinate the other, which to serve, how to ensure the sonic density of the album and the textual density of the book didn’t overwhelm each other. And Ellis just does it. Slavery, silence, “is dysfluency a form of perfect memory,” tripping flute, Toni Morrison, Édouard Glissant, “are my glottal blocks floods,” ebullient trumpet, keys and strings melting together, Christina Sharpe. A friend attended one of Ellis’ performances in 2022 and messaged me right after, “it sounded like the inside of my brain and maybe yours too?” Then I got to be at a performance in 2025. For weeks after, I couldn’t stop telling everyone how life-changing, how inspiring it was for me in terms of making my inter-disciplinary disabled art. They also brought a stuffed hippo onstage to ground them — a gift from their wife — which was inspiring for me in terms of getting a wife.

“Nights”, Frank Ocean (2016)

When I put “Nights” on a playlist it has to be right at the halfway point. Or else. It’s not a controversial opinion that this song is basically perfect. At 3:30 in the track, the exact halfway point of the album, Ocean downshifts the beat. From resentfully releasing an ambivalent lover to being displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The grief of losing a relationship subtended by the grief of losing a place. “Nights” reminds me that form can allow us to feel what seems too obvious to say. Subterranean grief changes the time signature. Every ending is a rehearsal, and so is every beginning.

“All Rivers At Once”, Orphx (2016)

Here’s the reversal. Grimy, driving, repetitive, distorted. If this isn’t what the wild beyond sounds like, I don’t know what is. I could dance all night, sober, with tiny flashlights on my fingers! I could sit through four hours of a Marxist-Leninist reading group! I could charge through a line of cops (hypothetical)! The siren under the synth makes me feral.

“when i enter a room, i look to u”, Yaz Lancaster (2025)

A dose of tense, escalatory sweetness to get us through. To me, a track that clocks in under two minutes is like a prose poem: expansive in its concision, the proximity of everything inside it to everything else. For Madness, I stacked (what I would consider) prose poems into (sort of) lyric essays. Does that make the essay like an album? I don’t know, but I love when the violin splits into multiple voices. Haunted, haunting.

“Haenim (햇님)”, Kim Jung Mi (1973)

I wrote one such essay which explored Teresa Teng’s love songs being labeled as “bourgeois spiritual pollution” and banned during the Cultural Revolution. The essay got cut somewhere along the way from the manuscript’s first draft to its final; mostly because I was already approaching 150 pages, to my editor’s chagrin. In hindsight, I’m also glad about the cut because I did a pretty bad job of exploring the political nuances here, including that the anti-communist KMT used Teng’s music as propaganda and psychological warfare against the CCP, and that part of the reason for the CCP’s censorship of Teng was China’s imperialist relation to Taiwan (Teng was Taiwanese). Anyway! Kim’s music, like Teng’s, was censored — but under very different circumstances. Kim was arrested in 1975, under the anti-communist, American-backed dictatorship of Park Chung Hee. Futuristic and affecting, her psychedelic rock record was pulled off shelves and destroyed. Her producer, Shin Joong Hyun, had defied an order from Park’s office to write a song praising the dictatorship.

“Amber Waves”, Ethel Cain (2025)

And here’s the unravelling. The woo-woo-wooshing. I have to include some Ethel Cain. Perverts, specifically, another album I played repeatedly during my revisions. The overlaid static distorts Cain’s typically angelic vocals just enough for me to accept this song’s beauty as part of this world, not transcending it. Madness Belong’s last section includes a love poem, to which I tried to apply this same ethos. I’ve performed that poem at a few readings now. Once, I described it as a “Marxist love poem”, and then an audience member came up to me afterward and told me it wasn’t a very good love poem.

Honourable mention to Perverts’ “Housofpsychoticwomn”, which is just a bit too scary to put on this playlist.

“New World Coming (darkDARK Remix)”, Nina Simone (2020)

I was introduced to this remix by one of the participants in a poetry workshop I facilitated in 2025. The workshop theme was endings and beginnings. An excuse to further my obsession with death, structurally and thematically — for pedagogical purposes! I did have the group do some icebreaker activities, like making a collective workshop playlist. I did not force everyone to participate. I like that this is a remix of a cover (“New World Coming” was originally written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for Cass Elliot) which embodies, most truly and ineffably, the essence of what the song was always meant to be. There were moments I felt it, while doing the organizing I wrote about in Madness: that wild swell, belief’s long arc. In the titular essay from Of Weapons and Words: Al-Aqsa Flood and the Compass of Anti-Colonial Resistance, Amer Mohsen writes, “‘Certainty,’ for me, is when you believe in something, are convinced of it, and commit to it to the extent that you accept the possibility of victory just as you accept the possibility of defeat—because it is the right choice, or the only choice. And that is all the certainty you need.”

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

Jody Chan is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, care worker, and community organizer. They are the author of two previous books of poetry: sick (Black Lawrence Press 2020), finalist for the Lambda Literary and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry; and impact statement (Brick Books 2024), longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Jody was the 2023–2024 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Queer and Trans Research Lab, and the 2023 recipient of the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature from the Canada Council for the Arts. They live in Toronto.

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.

May-Lee Chai’s essay collection My Hungry Ghosts is an ever-smart exploration of generational trauma and racism.

Megan Giddings wrote of the book:

“My Hungry Ghosts is a stunning collection that weaves together memoir, history, prayer, and intuition. May-lee Chai has a poet’s control of line and image and the essayist’s ability to take complex people and situations and make it possible for readers to comfortably sit in nuance. A lovely, thoughtful book!”

In her own words, here is May-Lee Chai’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection My Hungry Ghosts:

My musical tastes were quite eclectic as I was writing the essays in My Hungry Ghosts. I listened to some Chinese composers who were directly riffing on themes of ghosts and folk traditions in their music, but I also found inspiration in works by musicians and singers from around the world.

I first experienced the traditional Chinese Buddhist and Daoist “Ghost Month” (鬼月) and “Ghost Festival”（鬼節）when I was a teenager traveling with my father to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1980s. I was fascinated by the way everyone would set up altars on sidewalks and burn “ghost money” and offer incense and plates of food to feed not just one’s ancestors but also the wandering ghosts who might not have descendants or who might have been forgotten. The idea is that this act of good karma will help the ghosts, paying off their karmic debts so that they can be freed of their suffering and be reborn or transformed.

Remembering Ghost Festivals past, I worked on organizing my essay collection. I chose twelve essays that I had written, for each month of the year, representing a different kind of “hungry ghost.” These essays span the globe and the decades, exploring the things that have haunted me: from my father’s migrations and experience of war during his childhood in China to inherited trauma from my mother’s childhood abuse in the U.S. to current events like climate change, rising authoritarianism, racism, and misogyny. I also created a “word altar” for these ghosts, as a way to feed them on the page and thus stop them from haunting me.

In putting together my playlist, I wanted to give a sample of some of my favorite ghostly music. We all have our hauntings, and I appreciated the way this theme was explored by so many different kinds of music whether through vocalization—by a whisper or a stretched note or a wail—or evoked sonically through drum beats, percussive instruments, and even full orchestras.

My Hungry Ghosts Playlist:

1) “Bitter Love: Against Time of Desire” (Track 1), Ying Huang, Steven Osgood, Tan Dun…

Long before his Oscar-winning soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, composer Tan Dun wrote the score for an avant-garde production of the 16^th century Chinese play, Peony Pavillion by Tang Xianzu, about a young scholar who falls in love with a ghost. Tan Dun mixes jazz, rock-and-roll, kunqu opera, Chinese folk music, and Western monks chanting in this ethereal love song between man and ghost.

2) “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” Sinéad O’Connor

This song gives me chills every time I hear it.

3) “Wuthering Heights” Kate Bush

Nothing is quite as haunting (or romantic) as Kate Bush’s high soprano as she portrays the ghost of Cathy calling out to her would-be lover, Heathcliff.

4) “O Death” Ralph Stanley (O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack)

A deeply moving track from the other Odyssey movie.

5) “The Here and After” Jun Miyake, Lisa Papineau

Hypnotic. I can listen to this track in a loop, over and over and over.

6) “Drown” Karen O and Danger Mouse

Not technically about a ghost but it could be, as Karen O’s expressive voice sings of a longing akin to drowning.

7) “Ghost” Beyoncé

“All these people on the planet working nine to five just to stay alive,” Beyoncé sings in a critique of a life lived just to survive but without joy. The song builds to an echoing chorus: “what goes up, ghost around…” The punning lyrics pack a punch.

8) “Hades,” The Odyssey soundtrack, Ludwig Göransson

I didn’t hear this piece until this summer, but it immediately resonated with me. WOW! It’s layered, gorgeous, eerie, haunting, everything you’d want for a scene in which the portal opens and the dead come to convene and tell their tales to the living.

9) “Heart Sutra” Faye Wong

Faye Wong at the peak of her talent singing the heart sutra is perfection. May she chant us all the way to nirvana.

also at Largehearted Boy:

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her story collection Tomorrow in Shanghai

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants

May-lee Chai’s playlist for her novel Dragon Chica

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

May-lee Chai is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation including the 2022 short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for The Story Prize; and Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories, which won a 2019 American Book Award; and her original translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and a Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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.

Alma Katsu’s novel Incarnate is a chilling modern take on the Faustian bargain for fame.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“A deal with the devil is reworked for the online age, with a healthy dose of body horror joining AI. The combination makes the story uniquely terrifying.”

In her own words, here is Alma Katsu’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Incarnate:

If you read the playlist for my last novel, Fiend, you already know that I rarely listen to music when I’m writing. I’d vowed to change that and… erm, I haven’t. But I will. I promise.

My new novel, Incarnate, is story about a Faustian bargain made by a young woman who wants to be a breakout success on social media. It’s about hiding our bad parts, only showing the good, pretending to be something we’re not—“Dorian Gray for the internet age” is the tag line. I was an early social media researcher and technology futurist and it was this experience that made me want to write Incarnate. I’ve watched the evolution of social platforms and other technologies for nearly twenty years and have come to see it as a net harm to mankind. We didn’t foresee how it would take a dark turn and become a tool for mass propaganda. How many of the emerging technologies of the past ten, fifteen years are tools for deception.

Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles

I’m going very old school for the first cut because, even though it was ostensibly about the then-coming video age of music, this song is just as true for the internet age we find ourselves in. This song, written in 1979, was the first video played on MTV when it launched in 1981. I was a very young music journalist at the time and hung around a big recording studio, listening to musicians fret over the growing interest in music videos, concerned that everything would change. That music would matter less than how the band looked and whether the uglier band members would find themselves out of work.

Nearly fifty years later, all of this is true for the social media age. The image, or pretty wrapper, has taken precedence over the message.

Besides, it’s also a super catchy tune.

The Internet by Jon Bellion

“Life became dangerous the day we all became famous” is the opening to Bellion’s song, and were truer words ever spoken? Did we know what the thirst for fame would bring us, though? A world where we value perception over reality, where perception has become, in most cases, as good as reality. “I don’t need to learn, just need you to think I get it” could be the motto of the millions of students who use ChatGPT as the substitute for their brain and don’t mind disabling their ability to learn.

Filter by BTS

A really pretty song about an ugly truth: technology has made it possible to get bored with the person we profess to love the most. But technology, luckily, also has the answer. It can allow us to overlay endless filters on our beloved to make them new to us every day. In Incarnate, the main character Dorothy feels inadequate—she’s not pretty enough, too fat, not special—thanks for social media, and that frustration and unhappiness propels her to reimagine herself, first virtually and then in the physical world, defying natural law, physics, the fabric of reality itself. Her physical transformation is so extreme, you might be tempted to think she’s looksmaxxing.

Such is the power of self-hatred.

Creep by Radiohead

This song has come to occupy prime real estate in my head since a friend sang it at a karaoke night (daring!) a couple years ago. A perfect portrait of self-loathing, an emotion that more and more of us are seized with as we compare ourselves to what we see on social media. That kind of longing, closely felt over a stretch of time, can warp you. Dorothy has many good attributes—she’s smart, she’s independent—but she lets herself be consumed by envy and self-pity because she can’t turn away from the black screen. She knows there’s something wrong with her, but she keeps it hidden because she knows the high social cost if she doesn’t.

I imagine every one of us has felt like the misfit on the outside looking in at some point in our lives.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears

Another oldie, but this song perfectly conveys the feeling you get when everything’s going your way. I remember when it came out in 1985, dancing to the video in clubs, never feeling so free. It’s the feeling Dorothy has, briefly, when it seems like her dreams are coming true. She’s created Isabella, the perfect virtual persona, and it seems like everyone in the world is falling in love with her. The sky’s the limit, and Dorothy, who has never gotten anything she’s ever really wanted in her entire life, is drunk on the sensation—and quickly becomes addicted to it.

 Dear Society by Madison Beer

You can’t watch this video without feeling badly for every young adult who grew up on social media, now occupying a liminal space between their parents’ experience and the next generation’s… Plus, there’s the chilling opening, where a smug technocrat congratulations the unwilling victim for being part of the training of this new technology destined to usher in a new age for mankind—in his opinion, anyway—that’s exactly how we feel as AI is being shoved down our throats.

True Story by Ariana Grande

In Incarnate, there’s a character named Catrina Villeneuve. She’s a singer having her break out moment when she walks into the visual effects studio where Dorothy works, and Dorothy ends up stealing her motion capture files to use as the basis for her creation Isabella. I visualized Grande when I wrote Villeneuve because she was exactly what I saw for this character: beyond human in her appearance and talent, driven, focused—but with a secret sadness, an apartness from everyone else. And when the worst happens after Dorothy’s stolen this part of her, the internet can’t stop gossiping about what’s happening to her. The public can’t stop looking at her tragedy.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Alma Katsu’s playlist for her novel Fiend

Alma Katsu’s playlist for her novel The Fervor

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

Alma Katsu is the author of Fiend, The Hunger, The Deep, The Fervor, and five other novels. Her work has won or been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Locus, Western Heritage, and International Thriller Writers awards, among others. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she had a thirty-five-year-long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies, including the CIA and NSA, as well as RAND. Katsu is a graduate of the master’s writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University. She lives in West Virginia with her husband.

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.

Norah Labiner’s novel Morocco is a compelling modern reimagining of Washington Square by Henry James.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“This is subtle but spectacular.”

In her own words, here is Norah Labiner’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Morocco:

The story started, if you can believe it, at a dinner party some long-ago evening, when by gaslight, just before the coffee—an actress told him of a rather plain, but fabulously wealthy young heiress and the fortune hunter who was pursuing the girl, to the great displeasure of her father, Dr.—. You remember him, don’t you, Henry?

What Henry James remembered or did not is lost to history. It remains only that he was taken with the story, and so he took it. He wrote Washington Square, the story of a rich girl who falls for a cad, is betrayed by her father, and yet somehow comes to determine her own fate.

James did not like his little book—or so he later claimed—, but I loved it. I loved it perhaps for the very reason that he hated it. He was a ghost in his own house. He tried to hide himself in the pages, but I found evidence of him everywhere. His dressing gown thrown over a chair, a forgotten teacup, an unfinished crossword puzzle, an ink pen. I heard him at the piano.

I think I saw him cutting roses in the garden.

I was taken with the story, and so I took it.

How a book comes to a writer is somewhere between love and theft.

Morocco is a book about books. It is an ode to stories. And not just good stories, but the bad ones too. Here is the art of the potboiler and the plot twist. Here is a world of overlooked girls and underestimated women, of romance novels and vampires and chocolate bars and soap operas, of postcards unsent, of time machines and typewriters. Here are horror movies and films, noir. Here are songs on the radio. And songs that you never hear on the radio. Here are broken clocks and pearls and a lost umbrella. Here is a golden bowl. Here is a raven and a writing desk. Here are jokes and their relation to the unconscious.

How a book comes to a reader is a kind of gift.

Morocco is a good book to read on a cold night or by a very blue swimming pool.

Here then is a musical interlude for my little book. Here are songs for haunted houses and ruined gardens and endless afternoons. Here are songs for your listening pleasure.

Summertime, Amália Rodrigues (1965)

This song is for every ghost in the graveyard.

Summertime – song and lyrics by Amália Rodrigues | Spotify

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Thelonious Monk (1954)

Here is a story that is a song. Strike that, reverse it.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes – song and lyrics by Thelonious Monk | Spotify

Near the Black Forest, Vanessa Daou (1994)

If you dream or have nightmares or like lemons.

Near the Black Forest – song and lyrics by Vanessa Daou | Spotify

The Box It Came In, Wanda Jackson (1967)

Here is a song that is a story with a happy ending.

The Box It Came In – song and lyrics by Wanda Jackson | Spotify

The Dark End of the Street, James Carr (1966)

Listen to this one again.

The Dark End of the Street – song and lyrics by James Carr | Spotify

Nadia’s Theme (The Young and the Restless), The Ventures (1970)

Here is a story that never ends.

Nadia’s Theme (The Young And The Restless) – song and lyrics by The Ventures | Spotify

Dreams, Faye Wong (1994)

If you like cake or carry a small dog in your handbag.

夢中人 – 電影《重慶森林》歌曲 – song and lyrics by Faye Wong | Spotify

Rivers of Babylon, Bony M. (1978)

This is a good song to sing in a strange land.

Rivers of Babylon – song and lyrics by Boney M. | Spotify

Beauty in the World, Macy Gray (2010)

Here is a song if you have ever opened a door and found yourself miraculously in a library.

Beauty In The World – song and lyrics by Macy Gray | Spotify

also at Largehearted Boy:

Norah Labiner’s playlist for her novel Let the Dark Flower Blossom

Norah Labiner’s playlist for her novel German for Travelers

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

Norah Labiner is the author of the novels Our Sometime Sister, Miniatures, German for Travelers, and Let the Dark Flower Blossom. She has received a Minnesota Book Award for Literary Fiction and currently lives in Minnesota.

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.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Said the Dead is wholly atmospheric and inventively told, one of the most impressive postmodern ghost novels I have read.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“Ní Ghríofa brings an elegiac sensibility to a haunting portrait of a hidden world . . . Weaving biography, history, fiction, and memoir, Ní Ghríofa vividly imagines the muffled voices of desperate women, honoring their suffering, and her own. A radiant work of empathy and insight.”

In her own words, here is Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Said the Dead:

Jonny Greenwood, ‘Never Cursed’, ‘Phantom Thread II’, ‘House of Woodcock’

‘Said the Dead’ was made in silence. There were my silent hours of research in the archive, reading my way through a series of century-old asylum casebooks. Then, there were the silent hours I spent roaming the remains of the asylum. And there were the silent hours of writing that followed, when I parked my car in the ruined shadow of that institution, and tried to pour all I’d learned into the pages of a book. I only invited music into this process if if I was disturbed by a hedge-trimmers or a yapping dog. In such moments, I’d dig out my noise-cancelling headphones and listen to the Phantom Thread soundtrack on loop. Like a river diverted into a culvert, something of that soundtrack might still be felt, burbling under the text of ‘Said the Dead’.

John McCormack, ‘Adeste Fideles’

So much of the process of writing this book occurred in silence, and yet, I always longed to evoke a sense of the soundscape of the asylum. Whereas the old stairwells would once have bustled with voices, I found those steps grown quiet – the sound of my footsteps echoed. Through the asylum casebooks, various doctors were writing to me from that loud past. Among them was Dr Scanlan, whose belief in the curative powers of music had been praised in local newspapers. There he was, rolling a piano to patients’ bedsides, hoping that music might help them towards healing. Other newspaper reports detailed the lengths he went to, one long-ago Christmas day, calling in favours from local musicians, so that he might treat the patients to a full orchestra. Among the hymns the orchestra played in the chapel that day, according to the newspaper, was ‘Adeste Fideles’. I came across a 1915 recording by John McCormack, and those lyrics seemed to beckon me closer. ‘Venite, venite’… come, they insisted, come. And I did. Although that derelict chapel was boarded as I stood outside in the rain on Christmas day, I held my phone to the security barrier and let the sound waves of that old hymn find their way in, slipping through that border to enter the chapel, a song turning back to enter its own past.

Lankum, ‘Go Dig My Grave’

The asylum casebooks held vivid descriptions of each woman as she arrived through the asylum doors: her name, age, address and next of kin were all recorded, followed by details of her hair, her eyes, her expression, her skin, her clothing, and sometimes, her speech. Often, these women spoke clearly and powerfully of their inner agonies, listing heartbreaks and losses and griefs, explaining what it was that had driven them to the noose, to the river, to the knife, or the window. The doctors wrote it all down, and a century later, I wrote it all down again. I was writing ‘Said the Dead’ when Lankum released ‘Go Dig My Grave’, and their version of this old song really shook me – how the dread rises and rises, while at its beating heart, Radie Peat’s voice soars with power and ferocity. Something in this song recalled the anguish so often articulated by patients in the asylum casebooks, particularly those who had been thwarted in their decision to end their lives. This song haunts me, still – a song of death, with a glint of defiant life pulsing inside it.

Emahoy Tsege Mariam, ‘Song of Abayi’

In the asylum casebooks, I read of a patient named Anna Martha, and I was struck by all she had held throughout her life. She’d held her brothers’ hands as they died, and then her father’s, too. Through seasons of shock and grief, she held her violin bow and held her paintbrush tight, determined to hold onto her devotion to art and music despite her sorrows, until a sudden change in financial circumstances meant that she could hold no longer. Her path to the asylum was decided the day she held a gun against the city magistrates. She would die in that institution, only a few years later, of tuberculosis – the same disease that had killed both of her brothers. I brought flowers to lay on her grave, but despite my map, I couldn’t find her place in the graveyard. Finally, I understood that she lay right where I stood, in an unmarked grave. Anna Martha’s name may not be written in stone, but it is written in this book. I will always hold the memory of her life dear. I know it’s an impossibility, but whenever I imagine Anna Martha’s youth, I see her sitting to her piano lessons, playing Emahoy Tsege Mariam’s ‘Song of Abayi’.

‘Kyrie’, Linda Buckley

The therapeutic role of music in the asylum extended far beyond Dr Scanlan’s gifts – there were regular concerts in the asylum ballroom, and guest visits from musicians on tour to city theatres. The ballroom has been closed to the public for decades, and the first time I visited, I found rain falling inside, through a hole in the roof. This past summer, however, we reopened those doors and brought music back to the ballroom. Composer and musician Linda Buckley designed an incredible musical performance, including motifs from the operetta ‘Patience’ once performed in the ballroom, alongside some readings from ‘Said the Dead’. It was unforgettable, and deeply moving, to remember those women in the room in which they had all once stood. I wish you could have been there. To give you a sense of it, here is the beautiful ‘Kyrie’ by Linda Buckley.

‘Rhiannon’, Fleetwood Mac

Doctor Lucia Strangman began to write in the casebooks towards the end of the 1890s, and she soon became my brightest guide. To piece together the history of the hospital in which she lived and worked was also to piece together a sense of this remarkable woman’s life. I found her a visionary, a gifted doctor, who was devoted to her patients and to improving their lives. Sometimes, as I wrote, I could feel her presence very close. At others, she sidestepped my efforts, slipping from my grip, like that line in Rhiannon— ‘she is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness’.

‘White Winter Hymnal’, Fleet Foxes

This book drew me on a quest, helplessly chasing traces of long-ago lives through stairwells and corridors and paths and tunnels, through ledgers and newspapers and casebooks, trying to follow the shadows of those who had been present a century before. It has been among the blessings of my life to spend these years of mine in service to their lives, to become the listener to this chorus of voices, and to follow, always to follow, and through these years, the lyrics of ‘White Winter Hymnal’ were a comfort to me, since I, too, ‘was following the I was following the I was following the I…’

‘Scars’, William Stafford

For quite some time, I wanted to call this book ‘Cicatrix’, a word I learned from Dr Lucia. This word refers to an old scar, and was often used in her casebook notes. It moved me, to read these detailed maps to the women’s bodies, to know that one woman had a long cicatrix along her leg, that another bore the mark of an amputated breast. This recording of William Stafford reading his poem ‘Scars’ is incredibly dear to me. The poem itself is a masterpiece. In an oblique way, it felt like every line chimed somehow with the book I was trying to bring into being. As he writes, ‘we see the lesson: / there are years in that book, there are sorrows / a choir can’t reach when they sing.’

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

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer. Her first prose work, A Ghost in the Throat, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the winner of the Irish Book Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year, the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the James Tait Black Prize; and a nominee for the Rathbones Folio Prize. It was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, The Observer (London), The Irish Times, and The Globe and Mail. Ní Ghríofa is also the author of numerous acclaimed books of poetry. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Centre fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

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.

Nicholas Russell richly evokes the haunting Nevada desert in his debut novel Observer.

Lincoln Michel wrote of the book:

“In Observer, Nicholas Russell makes the sun-scorched, desiccated West as haunting as any gloomy Gothic manor on the misty moors. The prose is equal parts page-turning and lyrical, and the plot a satisfying combination of science-fiction mysteries, family drama, and unfathomable horrors. A thrilling and chilling debut.”

In his own words, here is Nicholas Russell’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Observer:

I wrote Observer over the course of several years but turned to music most in the last six months, after the book was sold and I was on a firm deadline to hand in the first draft. Almost always, singing voices distract me when I’m reading and writing though they inspire me when I’m not. My novel takes place in a region of the Nevada wilderness that is both real and composite, informed by my own experiences growing up there but also the received myth of the desert so many people have been exposed to. The frontier is an imaginary place and always has been, a fact that allowed what I listened to while writing Observer to be as wide-ranging as the people in the American West.

“Nites Out” and “Desert”, Other Lives

Other Lives make music that belongs in Westerns. Perhaps an oversimplification, but there is a perennially cinematic, open-sky quality to their sound, which one imagines is heavily influenced by their origins in Oklahoma and the unconventional arrangement of instruments at their disposal. These two songs in particular make me think of dark clouds and rain in the desert, a visceral sense memory of the elements that makes the world feel both enchanted and dangerous.

“She Reminds Me of You,” Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross

I’m quite hesitant to turn to film scores when writing, especially because their function in any given film is prescribed to a specific scene and thus tempts the listener, or writer in this case, to mirror the beats and emotional arc of that scene. So much writing now is informed by movies and television, not just dialogue, but the montage-like rush through scenes and contexts. I’ve always appreciated how Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross can’t help but make music that stands on its own, no matter what project it’s a part of. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is perhaps the duo’s most haunting score, but it’s also percussive and exhilarating. It exaggerates the feeling of an investigation under way, which was a crucial element for Observer where a young woman searches for her missing mother through artifacts left behind and unreliable testimony given to her by strangers with their own agendas.

“13 Ghosts II”, NIN

The Ghosts series from Nine Inch Nails foreshadowed Reznor and Ross’s eventual foray into film composition and, during the pandemic, emphasized those cinematic sonic qualities that were always present in the NIN catalog. “13 Ghosts II” is a melancholic song that, in my head, is hummed rather than played on piano. It has that slippery thing that great instrumental/orchestral music has, where it lives in a deep-seated part of your mind such that it plays whenever you’re going through a specific emotional experience. There’s a lot of memory in Observer and this song feels like a memory.

“Hoist That Rag”, Tom Waits

Tom Waits belongs anywhere outcasts, weirdos, and vagrants live and there are plenty of those in McNairy, the fictional town at the center of Observer. In the novel, there’s a bar called the Spyglass that serves as a watering hole for a contingent of astrophysicists up at a mountain top observatory and when I imagined them drinking and fooling around, this song was the only one that came to mind. Funny, rhythmic, but so full of feeling, as so much of Waits’s music is. An earlier draft stated outright that Waits was playing through the speakers but in the end, I took it out. It mattered to me when writing those scenes what the music was, but there is such a thing as unproductive specificity and that was one of them. 

“Shadowplay (Royal Albert Hall 2009)”, The Killers

A bit of hometown bias showing through here, but the Killers were channeling something unique and authentically southwestern on their albums Sam’s Town and Day & Age. This live rendition of their cover of the Joy Division song would seem to be a departure from what casual listeners of the Killers might (mistakenly) deem the band’s terminal optimism. But lead singer Brandon Flowers is a desert kid, which means he can’t help but sympathize with and be fascinated by the seedy and uncomfortable pockets of urban life that are never as far away as some people wish. This song felt like a bridge between mother and daughter in Observer, the original and the cover communicating something in both directions.

“The Proposition #1” and “The Rider #2”, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

Not all deserts are the same, but I’ve often found the neo-Westerns made in Australia get at something true about the southwestern landscape that their American counterparts don’t. It’s not only about setting but mood. There’s a forgotten, unstable quality to Cave and Ellis’s score for The Proposition. It reminds me so vividly of driving out into the desert on a brutally hot day, alone, aimless, slightly weary, and still managing to find a relieving breeze. Cave and Reznor are also great whisperers and aren’t afraid to use their voices as instruments rather than lyrical vehicles. The sinister back half of “The Rider #2” does more to evoke the violence and peril of the expansionist colonial project than most bloody dramatizations of it (and The Proposition is plenty bloody).

“Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”, Radiohead

I’m not really interested in the type of characterization that tells readers what music or movies certain characters listen to. Often that feels like a vestige of press tours for movies where actors tell you how a director gave them a dossier of their character’s upbringing and favorite food. I did feel strongly though that the missing mother in Observer, Corinne, was someone who listened to Radiohead’s Amnesiac often, not only because it’s a frequently scary and unpleasant album but because Corinne is the kind of person for whom the scary and unpleasant aren’t necessarily negative. Amnesiac is, among many other things, an evocation of a nightmare, but one that becomes more and more legible as you spend time with it. That felt right for Corinne.

“A Gain”, Devendra Banhart

I see a stone well in a darkened chamber with an intermittent but constant drip of water when I listen to this song. For whatever reason, that was useful to me writing this novel. Sometimes it’s about a sound and a feeling and not necessarily the narrative.

“Summer Sickness”, Big Girl

This song became the anthem of Observer so it’s frustrating to me that I can’t remember how I found it. My girlfriend and I kept saying that this would play over a trailer of the movie, which, now that I think about it, would be wrong because the song deserves its build up. The opening lyrics “call it summer sickness/focusing on forgiveness” are thematically apt but more than anything, it’s the energy and pitch this song arrives at by the end, particularly with its final guitar solo and lead singer Kaitlin Pelkey’s ghostly wail, that feels like it captures the restless, searching spirit of the novel. Finding this song was also how I knew Observer was finally finished, how I knew that what it was had solidified and that, for better or worse, I couldn’t take the novel any further.

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

Nicholas Russell is a writer from Las Vegas. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Baffler, No Tokens, Defector, and Hunger Mountain. Observer is his 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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Isabelle Correa’s poetry collection Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It is dark, funny, and moving.

David Gate wrote of the book:

“This is a collection that refuses to behave or be boxed or be anything other than full and open hearted. Isabelle Correa writes desire as collision; body, memory, and longing crashing against the fragile idea of safety. These poems are sharp, darkly funny, and devastatingly honest about how we relentlessly return to intimacy, even when it hurts.”

In her own words, here is Isabelle Correa’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It:

I’m very feeling-centered in my work; you could call me a largehearted girl. My poems are often an exploration, a translation even, of internal worlds. Music is one of the best ways to enter an internal world, to bask in it, sit in it like a mud bath—whether that’s in the stage of writing, editing, or reading.

So, the foundation of this playlist is the songs I listened to while writing Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It. And when the collection was finished, I added and ordered the songs so that the playlist is in sync with the emotional tides of Portrait.

Those tides are turbulent but intentional. In reference to Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself,” “My Multitudes” are a recurring character in Portrait. This “character” appears in multiple poems, as if all the different versions of the speaker are a bumbling hive-mind vying for attention and a chance to take control. That kind of back-and-forth is reflected in the playlist.

Another aspect that influenced the creation of this playlist is the fact that art is not made in isolation. Artists are always in conversation with other artists. And I love it—maybe it’s because I was an English major; maybe it’s because I’m a Gemini rising; or maybe it’s just because this is a really cool thing. In writing and organizing the manuscript for Portrait, I wanted the influence from contemporary pop culture to come through. There is a poem from the perspective of Fleabag from the TV series of the same name. There is a poem with lines all from an episode of Judge Judy. References to Beetlejuice, Barbie, Janis Joplin, Maury. And then, of course, a lot of the pieces are in conversation with other poets. There are after poems of Margaret Atwood, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby, and Sylvia Plath. So with this playlist, I wanted to make sure that there were some contemporary artists who could be included in this conversation. Some of them are super well-known, like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Gracie Abrams, and some are artists that I came across through Instagram or Spotify shuffle that I’ve fallen in love with, like Girlhouse, Ella Vos, Laurel, Ruby Gill, and Sarah Jaffe.

Both the collection and the playlist are pretty long. So here are a few of the songs reflecting a variety of multitudes and why they made the list.

Stream the playlist on Tidal

“Insensitive” — Jann Arden

This is one of the first songs I ever memorized. I was four and it was on the radio all the time. It’s symbolic of how I learned to love, which is the theme and purpose of the first section in Portrait titled “Becoming.” The song belongs near the beginning of the playlist because it belongs at the beginning of the story, when the speaker is learning (from the radio, from movies, from her family) what love is supposed to look like.

“La Vie en Rose” — from French Kiss

When I lived in Saigon, I used to drive around at night when the streets were empty on my scooter and listen to this song. And before that, I used to listen to the French Kiss movie soundtrack in the white Honda I drove in high school, which is a line from the poem “Dear New Year” in Portrait. 

“Send me La Vie En Rose from the movie French Kiss 

on a cd in my old white Honda.”

This song is the epitome of romantic love and pleasure, which is one of the currents running through Portrait. It is, after all, a collection of love poems.

“Pool” — Samia

Because this song is haunting and confessional. Yes, Portrait is a collection of love poems, but they are love poems that like to take a trip down to hell from time to time.

“Wet T-Shirt” — Ruby Waters

Because just because this collection is sad doesn’t mean it’s not also sexy.

“That Funny Feeling” — Bo Burnham

When the comedy special Inside by Bo Burnham came out, I was still in Vietnam. It was 2021 and there was a strict lockdown being enforced. So I would sit alone in my studio apartment with my dogs and watch Inside over and over again. It was one of those mind-blowing experiences of being not only seen by a piece of art, but being almost complicit in it, because I was experiencing it myself in that moment on the deepest level. So this song made the playlist in part because of my obsession with the comedy special that it’s from, and also because this song in particular reflects someone who is worried about the state of the world as well as their place in it. And that’s reflective of the speaker of Portrait because she is lost in her own psyche, but she also is porous; the world keeps getting in.

Phoebe Bridgers — “Georgia” and “As Above”

Phoebe Bridgers is on here twice, for “Georgia” as the second song and “As Above” as the last song. She’s the bookends of this playlist, and there are layers of reasons for this.

First, “Georgia”: According to Pitchfork, “the earliest composition, ‘Georgia,’ dates back to Bridgers’ teenage years, when she crafted her own lyrics out of a misremembered Feist track.” This is why this gorgeous song full of yearning is near the beginning—it’s a young song. It’s a song that was trying to remember another song and instead became itself.

“As Above,” from her recent new album, Lost Weekend: this song is a poem, with some “line breaks” that made me audibly gasp.

“I thought about my mom /
Drivin’ herself to the hospital”

Nobody writes sadness like Phoebe Bridgers does. This song aches; it traces its patterns (as above, so below). It feels like the same breath as “‘What Went Wrong’ is Question and Answer” from Portrait, a poem about looking back as a way of looking forward and inward.

And lastly, Phoebe Bridgers is in conversation with Bo Burnham. What better way to end a weird, wild, nuanced romantic playlist than with love between artists?

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

Isabelle Correa is a poet from Washington State now living in Mexico City. She studied creative writing at Western Washington University, is the winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the author of the book Good Girl and Other Yearnings, and the chapbook Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus. Her work has appeared in Pank, Third Point Press, The Rebis, and more. You can connect with Isabelle at isabellecorrea.com.

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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.

Genevieve Plunkett’s The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch is one of my favorite debuts of the year, a brilliant working class novel with an unforgettable protagonist.

Electric Literature wrote of the book:

“Plunkett writes women whose brains are brilliant whirring machines. . . . This is an astonishing novel from a wild talent.”

In her own words, here is Genevieve Plunkett’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch:

The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch was born directly from the time I spent working at a café in my hometown during the early 2000s. My boss, Robin, was the first to coin the phrase, “Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch,” as a way to pay homage to particularly impressive produce specimens. It was a joke that we would have ridden to the end of time, and one that I am apparently still clinging to. Robin was a beloved bad influence, well ahead of her time. She never catered to the norm, refusing to honor fad diets, chasing paying customers out for talking on their cellphones. She performed same-sex civil unions in the middle of the breakfast rush with her batter-smeared apron still on. In me, she saw great potential for mischief-making, and was always trying to convince me to buy a motorcycle or have an affair. She loved books and art and music. If there was a song or an album that she was into, she’d play it incessantly, even if it drove everyone else crazy. She was an icon. She did not give a shit. And so, my friends, this playlist is a direct reflection of what I was forced to listen to during some of the most impressionable years of my life.

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road may have been the most played song in café history, and I was probably the only employee who did not eventually want to stick my head in the coffee grinder because of it. It’s upbeat and devastating and perfectly captures that dreamy, melancholic state of a tossed-around childhood. Lucinda’s voice is so matter-of-fact it feels like found art. This line still gets me every time:

“Child in the backseat, ‘bout four or five years/ Lookin’ out the window/ Little bit of dirt mixed with tears/ Car wheels on a gravel road.”

The song itself, played again and again, was its own cult of insatiability, with Robin at its center. I understood her need to dig her nails into life itself, by any means available, even if it was just flying out from the kitchen to press repeat.  

There was, however, a boy who worked with us during the “Car Wheels” era who thought the lyrics were “cartwheels on a gravel road.” He was living in a completely different universe.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot

I think this song has been trolling me my whole life. It’s not just annoying, it also goes on and one with no clear destination. It’s the kind of song you hear playing in a doctor’s office and you’re like, “shit, why do I feel suddenly exhausted? Why am I clammy? Why can’t they find a pulse??”  

Can’t Find My Way Home, Blind Faith

We had a few “café angels” who would leave us mixes anonymously. This song was on one particular mix (I think it was labeled CAFÉ MIX) that got a lot of play time, and it reflects the usual behind-the-counter mood. We, the baristas (with maybe the exception of “cartwheels” boy), were so full of longing, so nostalgic for something we couldn’t name. And we were all heartbroken for some reason or another. There was nothing left for us to do but tattoo ourselves, dream of running away, and tease all the men. Big sigh.

Where is my Love? Lucinda Williams

Big, big sigh.  

Hurricane, Bob Dylan

This song is what it feels like to be trapped in a half-waking workplace anxiety dream. I wish Bob would have left some air for the rest of us.

Amassakoul ‘N’Tenere, Tinariwen

It was 2005, we obviously had a bunch of the Putumayo compilations. This song was from the Mali album and it was a banger.

Corinna, Corinna, Leo Kottke

We baked with a lot of “heartbreak sugar” and “heartbreak flour,” which was what we called the leftover ingredients rescued from kitchens we once shared with our exes. With these ingredients we made many batches of heartbreak muffins and scones, and fed them to the townspeople, as if to distribute the burden. The front window of the café was home to a “heartbreak jade plant” of mine. For years, it thrived there. Also, how dare Leo Kottke do this to us?

Hide and Seek, Imogen Heap

Robin, you were the heart of this little town. Our café is gone, replaced by businesses with zero personality. Everyone is playing it too safe and there’s this thing called AI that you would absolutely hate. Anyway, I hope this book stirs up some beautiful mischief. It’s getting boring on this side of the veil. 

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

Genevieve Plunkett is the author of In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel and Prepare Her. A recipient of an O. Henry Award and the Sewanee Review’s Andrew Lytle Prize, her writing can be found in the Sewanee Review, Electric Literature, Write or Die, Story, and the Southern Review, among others. She lives in Vermont with her partner and their children.

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