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Archive for the 'Playlists' Category

Playlists

Merely Swoop: Sean Michaels’s Playlist for 'Do You Remember Being Born?'

by Sean Michaels, September 6, 2023 8:59 AM
Author Sean Michaels pictured next to the cover of his novel 'Do You Remember Being Born?'

Nobody needs a playlist that doesn’t cast a weather in the air. So the one I offer here is meant to do that: to make it rain, or snow, or shimmer, wherever it is you’re sitting. It’s inspired by my new book Do You Remember Being Born?, which follows the story of a famous 75-year-old poet, named Marian Ffarmer. She is sitting at home in her Manhattan apartment when she gets a letter from a Big Tech company. Come here to California, they say, and write a poem with our machine...

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Playlists

The Past is a Corridor: Edan Lepucki’s Playlist for ‘Time’s Mouth’

by Edan Lepucki, August 3, 2023 8:20 AM
The Past is a Corridor: Edan Lepucki’s Playlist for ‘Time’s Mouth’

I always listen to music when I write. It helps me focus, it shuts out the noise of the world, and it often puts me in an emotive space so that I can feel deeply for, and with, characters who are going through a lot. While working, I make compilations of songs that best serve the fictive moment I’m wrestling with; some songs migrate from playlist to playlist, persistently essential to my process, and others I only want to hear for a few weeks. What follows is a list of songs I listened to when writing...

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Playlists

Pills, Pills, Pills: Ruth Madievsky’s Playlist for ‘All-Night Pharmacy’

by Ruth Madievsky, July 14, 2023 9:13 AM
Pills, Pills, Pills: Ruth Madievsky’s Playlist for ‘All-Night Pharmacy’

Maybe it’s the poet in me, but when it comes to music, I’m a lyrics queen. I have trouble writing when a song I know is playing, because I find myself tuning into the words of the song instead of my own. Sure, the instrumentals are important, but the lyrics are what determine whether a song hits like a banger for me.

When I was working on my debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, I had a mental moodboard of songs that captured the vibe of the book. “Hot, sad, sapphic weirdos” was a recurring theme. Lots of St. Vincent, Lucy Dacus, and Jenny Lewis...

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Playlists

It’s Brutal Out There: Julia Fine’s Playlist for ‘Maddalena and the Dark’

by Julia Fine, June 14, 2023 9:28 AM
It’s Brutal Out There: Julia Fine’s Playlist for ‘Maddalena and the Dark’

Set at the famed Venetian orphanage and music conservatory the Ospedale della Pietà, Maddalena and the Dark is obviously a book full of music. Initially inspired by the challenge of writing a novel whose characters traded perspectives like orchestral soloists passing each other melodies, I ultimately found myself influenced not only by Antonio Vivaldi — who wrote many of his famous works for the Pietà’s all-female orchestra — but also a range of contemporary musicians tapping into the ecstasy...

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Playlists

Excavating Memory: William Lee Adams’s Playlist for ‘Wild Dances’

by William Lee Adams, June 12, 2023 9:40 AM
Excavating Memory: William Lee Adams’s Playlist for ‘Wild Dances’

Sorrow and joy, guilt and responsibility, remembrance and denial — music helps us encode and later restore so many of our feelings and experiences. While writing my memoir Wild Dances, I used this playlist to excavate memories, some of which I’d forgotten, others that I’d deliberately buried. Those memories helped me understand how my various traumas and failures, which I now see as re-directions, led me to embrace Eurovision — the glitter-slicked song contest known for its outlandish staging...

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Playlists

Clock In: Jinwoo Chong’s Playlist for 'Flux'

by Jinwoo Chong, March 24, 2023 9:44 AM
Flux

I had my first inklings of the novel that eventually became Flux about a year after I was laid off from my first job after college, the result of a corporate takeover of my company that eliminated my entire department. While a tough hurdle to overcome at twenty-one years old, I learned a lot about self-sufficiency, and, once I was ready, decided this episode of my life would make....

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Playlists

Interstices of Space: E. J. Koh’s Playlist for 'The Magical Language of Others'

by E. J. Koh, September 22, 2022 9:10 AM
Nuclear Family

At the Seattle Art Museum, I saw a Rothko exhibit where he was quoted: "To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command." It reminded me of how I hoped to write The Magical Language of Others. I didn’t want to command the story — I wanted to be lost in it. These songs are the interstices of my experiences writing the memoir and they allowed me to remain lost within the writing. I owe them for letting me see how I can write but also how I can live the same way....

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Playlists

“Chased by Ghosts”: Joseph Han's Playlist for 'Nuclear Family'

by Joseph Han, September 20, 2022 8:43 AM
'Nuclear Family' by Joseph Han

Music helped me set the tone as I wrote Nuclear Family, as a way to get into a certain headspace for a particular scene or chapter shift between characters. I turned to these songs as thematic barometers; the following playlist charts the emotional trajectory of the novel, in particular that of Grace and Jacob — one of the central sibling relationships that are put in relation to their family’s history, secrets, and ghosts both personal and unrelenting...

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Playlists

“The Book You Wrote Is Equal to the Songs You Heard”: Rodrigo Fresán's Playlist for 'The Remembered Part'

by Rodrigo Fresán, August 2, 2022 9:06 AM
The Book You Wrote Is Sort of Equal to the Songs You Heard

All of my books — all three Parts among them — are filled with music. But in The Remembered Part, the songs and melodies go one step beyond and become, more than ever, a decisive factor in the story. Here are some (a very few) of those songs. The rest of the playlist waits for you in the novel.

Tune in...
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Playlists

Ballads and Break-Ups: Garrett Hongo's Playlist for 'The Perfect Sound'

by Garrett Hongo, June 28, 2022 8:26 AM
'The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo' by Garrett Hongo
In his memoir, The Perfect Sound, poet Garrett Hongo writes lyrically and lovingly about all of the ways music has defined his life — from the waves in Hawaii to the doo-wop and soul in LA to a ghostly lute in Rome — as well as his lifelong journey in pursuit of the perfect stereo set-up. In this playlist he put together for us, Hongo takes us on a similar musical journey, from heartbreaks in California to arias in Milan. Turn your speakers up and enjoy...
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