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Rebecca Birrell’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel ...

2026-11-03T08:54:25Z

Rebecca Birrell’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Venus, Vanishing

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Rebecca Birrell’s novel Venus, Vanishing is an encompassing and unsettling debut.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“The literary debut from art historian Birrell magnificently reimagines Jewish women’s artistic pursuits in 1930s Berlin and their world of bohemian individuality as they confront an oppressive regime that erases people, figuratively and literally. The prose, which is of high caliber, sensitively reveals the process of creation and poses questions about what artistic freedom truly means. Especially recommended for readers of Lisa Barr and Julie Orringer.”
In her own words, here is Rebecca Birrell’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Venus, Vanishing:
It feels shameful to admit that music isn’t important to my work. I have never listened to music while writing. I could explain this by arguing that visual art has always been at the forefront of my thinking, and perhaps because the mind has only finite space for creative inspiration— or so I have reasoned in the past—music has never been an equivalent touchstone. Another problem I might point to is that I intuitively share the art historical canon beloved by my protagonist, Hannah, a young Jewish seamstress aspiring to be a painter in the late twenties in Berlin. I imagine there are people out there regularly listening to thirties jazz and cabaret numbers, but I am not one of them.
I expect, however, that the discomfort goes deeper than this. I remember being asked in my twenties what music I liked by people innocently attempting to get to know me and announcing in response: ‘I don’t listen to music.’ I didn’t mean this literally —what I meant was that I didn’t know how to provide an answer that would shed any light on my personality. Similarly, I worried I wouldn’t be able to make much meaningful sense of Venus, Vanishing this way. So, I went back to my Spotify Wrapped for the year I wrote the first messy draft of the novel, 2024. Well, that was enlightening—by which I mean, traumatising and very funny. I could see the shape of my own histrionics, and my attempts to overcome them, in the collection of songs about love and longing. Many of the songs I was listening to then had embarrassingly literal connections to what was going on in my personal life, which I kept as compartmentalised as possible, not wanting to let it encroach upon my writing. I won’t bore readers with the vast quantities of Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams I was blasting out my phone’s tinny speakers while I sat in my bedroom crying. These are mostly crossover songs that enriched the novel, but also helped me feel less insane about my own circumstances so I could muster the energy and wherewithal to write.
Mitski, “Nobody”
When Hannah moves away from her family to a room of her own at the beginning of the novel, I wanted to convey something of the possibility and excitement that entails—as well as its occasionally melancholic aspect. I was living alone in a house on the edge of the city when I wrote the novel, so I knew this experience well, and had found solace in this song’s account of desire and loneliness. ‘My God I’m so lonely,’ Mitski sings, but her tone isn’t exactly unhappy—there’s pleasure in the confession, almost a pride in the self-sufficiency of her solitude, and this was something I hoped to convey in those early parts of the novel.
Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love”
I tend to think of this as a song about emotional avoidance, something which is very relevant to Hannah in the novel, who finds herself lying about her relationship with her patron more and more to her lovers as time passes. Love involves responsibility and vulnerability and sometimes we don’t feel up to the challenge of that, would rather run from it, maintain our so-called autonomy—and I love the imagery Bush uses to express this: the wounded fox she can’t bear to hold as it dies. This will be a common theme in the playlist, but I also think of this song as being about creativity—feeling pursued, haunted, stirred, and the courage that’s required in allowing yourself to confront and inhabit that desire.
Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”
The letters of artists and writers in the early and mid-twentieth century were a significant source of inspiration for the novel. This a favourite example of a song with an epistolary format, one which really feels like a letter in parts: the remarkable scene-setting in the first verse; the oblique, private details—why is the blue raincoat ‘famous’? —that give a sense of a full, shifting, intersubjective world behind the writing. It also happens to touch on many of the novel’s themes: desire, betrayal, jealousy.
Florence + the Machine, “Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up)”
Another song about ambition, and wondering whether you can adequately meet the magnitude of your fantasies and aspirations. ‘Will it ever be enough?’ Florence asks and answers herself immediately: ‘it’s not enough.’ I wanted Hannah’s relationship to her own creativity to feel like this: urgent, hungry, always grasping for better and more. ‘This is a gift, it comes with a price/Who is the lamb and who is the knife?’ The gift, perhaps, is talent, artistic capability, and sometimes it’s unclear who has the authority—the artist or the art, which can feel like an exterior force bearing down upon her, causing her pain, pushing her beyond her limits. These power dynamics also resonate with those that fuel the erotic relationships in the novel, though I don’t think there’s much question of who the sacrificial object is, and who threatens violence. Attention, acclaim and eros galvanise Hannah, but she remains aware of her vulnerability, and her conscientiousness as an artist is largely motivated by dread about the arrangement with her patron, Elke, crashing down around her.
Lorde, “Perfect Places,” “Liability,” “Writer in the Dark”
These songs are sensitive to the ecstatic, self-destructive attempts at release that punctuate spells of anguish and self-doubt, in romantic love as much as creativity. This tension underlies all of Hannah’s actions and choices throughout the novel. ‘Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark,’ is obviously a line I feel an affinity with, but more because I think writers are annoying to date than what Lorde implies, which is that writers/artists have the power to blow up your life with the intensity of their emotions, not least because they have a global stage on which to express said emotions. But there’s another way of interpreting this line that feels more accurate to Hannah. If you are possessed by a creative vocation your desire for it will be stronger than your desire for a person, it will make you selfish, wilful, emotionally unavailable, and I think this becomes true for Hannah at several key points in the novel.
Gracie Abrams, “I Love You, I’m Sorry”
Ok, will you indulge me one Abrams song? Coming to the end of the novel, it was useful to have a song ready at hand that expressed regret, wistfulness, and impossibility. Listening to so much contemporary anguished young woman pop music might seem ill-suited to writing about this period of history, but the novel is, at its heart, a coming-of-age story inspired by the diaries and letters of young women who continued to worry about love and desire even as the world as they knew it collapsed around them—this was my justification, at least.
Truthfully, though, this song became more like a sedative I would administer after I finished writing for the day. I listened to it so many times during the gestation of the novel that when I eventually happened across the music video (some eighteen months after I’d first heard it) I felt a cold, dissociative dread set in. These were my thoughts and feelings, not hers; it didn’t matter that the song was comprised of references that had no bearing on my life. I have since come to realise, sanely, that these are in fact Abrams’ experiences to sing about. But I feel a certain amount of pride (and embarrassment) at the deranged number of times I played it in the latter half of that year (according to Spotify, nearly 500).
Joanna Newsom, “Does Not Suffice”
So much of Venus, Vanishing is about the pleasure—sensual and visual—Hannah takes in garments, and how her work as a seamstress comes to shape her aesthetic as a fine artist. This song feels like an investigation, in Virginia Woolf’s words, of ‘frock consciousness’—a state I hope my novel provides some access to too. The emotional, tactile cataloguing of colours, textures and fabrics shares the imaginative aims of my own writing about clothes.
Paul Simon, “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War”
Simon is possibly my favourite lyricist. I love his poetic, playful, moving storytelling—there are songs on Graceland that make me very envious as a writer—so I was thrilled when I discovered this sweet, tender piece of art historical fiction writing, inspired by a photograph of surrealist Magritte and his wife taken by the German photographer Lothar Wolleh.
For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.
Rebecca Birrell is an art historian and a Bye-Fellow in the History of Art at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. She was formerly the curator of nineteenth and twentieth century paintings and drawings at the Fitzwilliam Museum and has occupied curatorial positions at the Jewish Museum London, the Department of Prints and Drawing at the British Museum, and at the Charleston Trust. She studied English literature at University College London, followed by a master’s in women’s studies at the University of Oxford and a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art. Venus, Vanishing is her debut novel.
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Emma Smith-Stevens’s Book Notes music playlist for her story ...

2026-10-31T01:49:30Z

Emma Smith-Stevens’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Greyhounds

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Emma Smith-Stevens follows up on one of my favorite novels of the century, The Australian, with the surprising and powerful story collection, Greyhounds.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“In one particular standout, “Neighbors,” a widow watches her neighbor, who struggles with hoarding disorder, find meaning and joy in rehabilitating retired greyhounds but can’t resist sabotaging that happiness. Threaded with dark humor and rendered with incisive prose, these stories will resonate with fans of Kristen Roupenian (You Know You Want This, 2019) and Marie-Helene Bertino (Exit Zero, 2025).”
In her own words, here is Emma Smith-Stevens’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Greyhounds:
Writing my first book, a novel called The Australian, overlapped with composing the stories Greyhounds, which took about fourteen years. Throughout that time, I was publishing short fiction, essays, and occasionally humor. When I became aware that I had readers, or even that I potentially could—especially when my work began appearing online—I was horrified by the idea of “writing from life.” My life, anyway. I’m reminded of cultures in which people believe that having one’s photograph taken will steal their souls. I dreaded writing in the first person. My novel is about a man from the other side of the world. Listen, though. Memory is imagination, the stories we construct to make sense of being alive—so it’s all kind of silly. My personhood, my life, are not separate from my imaginings. Nonetheless, “I” felt like a humiliating disclosure, pinched-pale flesh while wearing a too-tight outfit under fluorescent lighting.
When I think of the memoir I started writing several years ago, while Greyhounds was still in the works, great Southern author and my graduate school professor, Padgett Powell (e.g. Edisto, The Interrogative Mood, Indigo), warned me sternly not to write a “me-more.” I think he was quoting Gore Vidal. I tried, for over three years, to write a memoir in which I did not appear even once. A clever trick, it so happens, if one can pull it off. I cannot. Who can? Nabokov. See: Look at the Harlequins (1974). Thanks for humbling me, catchers of indigo snakes and butterflies, respectively.
*
The stories in Greyhounds can be sad, and if you knew which flickers alight from memory, which after writing The Australian I began inviting into my writing, it would maybe sting worse. I don’t know, though, and it doesn’t really matter. Greyhounds benefits from being fiction.
No, it’s not depressing, just sad where life hurts. Funny, too. It’s not a “sex book,” though I was flattered to have been called a “sex writer” one time by a star writer. Hello: it’s just me, doing my best to tell the truth using unhinged lies and a few truth-truths, here and there. The astronaut stuff in the story “Orbit”—that’s factual. The space station, the reaching hand. Like I said, who cares?
Another thought: fiction is either false or true. It depends on the depth of imagination and empathy; style, rhythm, silence; honesty and depth of feeling and meticulousness; and an irrepressible desire to make sentences so tight they ping. The truth or lie on the page is not about facts or fables but the pulp at the core of the words, put in a particular order, by a mind; and ultimately, it comes down to whether that mind is fearless or fearful when it looks into its own messy center.
*
Greyhounds is a slender volume spectacularly designed by Carrie Guss. You may be wondering how to read it. Here we go. Open up that little compartment at the top of your sternum just below the Adam’s apple, and place a heavy, cold stone inside, the kind that makes tears feel imminent and swallowing feel so… My God, that stone? Obsidian. Maybe Tiger’s Eye. In any case, it’s been polished, not left coarse or jagged. Don’t worry. I’m just standing waiting to pay for my gas, check out my groceries, at the post office, and then I think: people are beautiful. Or, remembering how the woman in her 60’s working in the toll booth before the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge said, “Have a good day,” and I smiled—and, out of view, I sobbed. Later, I see a man throw a coffee stirrer on the ground at a gas station, and I think: we all deserve a brutal demise, except the light-giving miracles among us: the toll booth woman, babies and children, oh—and angels, obviously. I don’t believe in angels, but 70% of Americans do. Shouldn’t that be enough? For me? And you?
*
Greyhounds is sad, but what isn’t sad? And who? Are you sad? If not, are you okay? The book’s funny, too. I hate the word “levity,” and thankfully I think Greyhounds is not for people who are too good for the word “funny,” and instead say “levity.”
*
On 12/15/2015, I became ill. I have not, for even a moment, felt free of sickness since I woke up that day. Initially, I was found to have Lyme and a second tick-borne disease called Babesia. I treated them aggressively for a year but was worse than ever. I was then diagnosed with three autoimmune diseases and various complications. They keep rolling in. I get infusions, take medications, keep myself walking my dogs several times a day, try not to look back.
I saw my bloodwork in the cursed patient portal yesterday. I’m trying to be whatever, but it sucked. Zoom out and you’ll see that the big, the huge, the enormous things are mixed, fused, muddled, rivering betwixt and between one another. Always. Everything’s a mess. I love my life. My body wants me dead. I want the diseases gone. I’ll do anything. I’d go down with the ship, but I am the ship—and the ocean. I’m talking about specters and shapes in my field of vision.
*
My husband S’s birthday was yesterday, and I watched our four little nieces—his brother’s daughters—pile on him when we entered their house, screaming their mispronounced version of his name. Later, the eight-year-old and eldest, C, issued complex instructions for a game of her own invention to me, my husband, and her two younger sisters (the fourth sister was a newborn)… C was a flight attendant and also a passenger who needed a beverage, and when the passenger went to the bathroom, C would reappear as her own evil twin. She gave us all a list of rules of conduct, which my husband and I couldn’t keep straight. Somehow her little sisters could. That scene—the girls’ laughter, all our shared happiness—felt realer and more true than my own self.
*
I have a memory of lying in the center of a large hospital room, which looked like an operating room, though I was not having surgery, so why would this be? In walked three women in white coats with their names and M.D. embroidered on the breast. I was vaguely aware that they were talking, but they seemed to be at a great distance. It did not occur to me that I might be the subject of their conversation. I felt like a voyeur. Then, one doctor, looking concerned, asked the others if I’d had an EEG. Her colleague said, “Yes, 48-hours, and an L.P.” Something, results were something-something. All of a sudden, I tumbled into a mainframe, into my body, a lone seed in a pod. “There she is,” said a tall doctor with brown, frizzy hair and a tender smile. I felt like a baby.
I don’t recall much about my talk with this doctor. I might not have said a word. I do know she told me about a book. The title had “winter” in it; maybe The Wintertime or The Wintering. She said, “It’s written by Katherine… Oh shoot, I can’t remember her last name. Katherine with a K.” The doctor approached the guardrail of my gurney and stood above but not over me. (There’s a big difference.) Like a dream-wave: one that protects and never crashes. “You,” she said, “are in the winter of your life.” I don’t remember what she said next, because though I’m much improved, I’ve been home for a few years, can think far more clearly, and people are correct distances from me, I’m still a little frozen, parts of me stinging, throbbing as they awaken, especially when touched. Snow still falls, icicles like needles from tree limbs. Nonetheless, I’m moving, going somewhere. The next morning, the frizzy-haired doctor appeared again. I was trying to talk but couldn’t. Then, just when she was walking out the door, I said, “Katherine with a K.” She turned and smiled. “You remember.”
Human moments in medical spaces are extra beautiful. There’s no way to describe them except to say, again we’re back to angels, something better than a promise—something larger and more real than your very own life, which is being handed to you, like a globe. No, the whole universe.
*
I used to be able to listen to music sitting in loud cafés while I wrote. Now I need at least semi–private spaces to think and write. I walked and drove out the songs on my playlist, thinking about the stories I imagined and gathered in my Craigslist photo and quote collection. Sometimes I thought of my own stories. Those days, years, that old life, I walked and walked.
I spent the early years of writing these stories walking along train tracks in Rhinecliff and Germantown and Hudson, towns in New York’s Hudson Valley. For a year, a terrible one, I lived in Los Angeles, wished I had the guts to be a stripper, met a guy while I was crying on the sidewalk, I overshared, he overshared, you know. I went to graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville—those years were three spinning gold records that kept playing these songs and adding new ones. I live in Brooklyn now. My medical team has told me to stay in New York City, so here I am, with my husband and two Azerbaijani rescue dogs, strays-turned-massage enthusiasts, Lena and Bob.
My husband I moved to Brooklyn to be near my doctors and family. Boom: the pandemic. My husband and I got COVID almost immediately. I was infused with monoclonal antibodies immediately, in a trailer with a space heater at Maimonides Hospital—the antibodies were magic; three days later I felt better than I had in years. Soon the effects wore off, but something new seemed possible. Seems possible.
*
You may realize these are love songs, fuck songs, craving and desire and touching yourself songs. Jealousy songs. Crying about them, missing them, goddam them, who need’s them? All that stuff is hopeful. There’s life in those things. Music loves me up and drives me forward—never home. I don’t have one. (I mean, in a literal sense, my husband and I rent an apartment—don’t worry.) The only real home I’ve known, though, has been my body. I’ve been evicted. I go forward, on the edge of my seat, flooring the pedal down, gunning it toward love, hunger, thirsting for more life, more love, more life, more love. Searching for the road home.
*
I started pairing the playlist So I Know You’re Real with photos from Craigslist during a high point: thriving in graduate school, making new friends, finding mentors, my bipolar disorder largely in remission. I met my husband when he was a prospective student visiting my MFA program in creative writing. When I got sick a few months after we married, I stopped So I Know You’re Real. I didn’t feel so real myself, I suppose. I was so desperate for relief. Early on, I looked into the liquid of doctors’ eyes, blue, hazel, brown, green; sometimes I thought they might cry, they might already be crying, right there before me, a shimmering wall of tears—and I’d realize it was my eyes straining against overflow.
The important fact about this mix is that I put these songs together for a Tumblr I used to have—stones I found on Craigslist personal ads (“Missed Connection,” mostly) about need, loneliness, nostalgia, anger, love, crushing hard, craving, abandonment, voids. This playlist was embedded as the soundtrack on the Tumblr along with the photos below (and many more). Somehow these songs announced themselves as an obvious playlist for Greyhounds. The music and images and captions borrowed from Craigslist “Missed Connections” and other personals are called, collectively, So I Know You’re Real.
Do you remember how in posts on the site, people would request: “Put ‘fly girl’ in the subject line so I know you’re real’” or “type WICCA N WANDS so I know you’re real?” Type “I love you forever” so I know you’re real.” Write “Big boy.” Write “My Manga future wife.” Write “Angels all over” so I know you’re real.
So I Know You’re Real
also at Largehearted Boy:
Emma Smith-Stevens’s playlist for her novel The Australian
For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.
Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of The Australian. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

https://largeheartedboy.com/2026/10/30/emma-smith-stevenss-book-notes-music-playlist-for-her-story-collection-greyhounds/

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Kaaron Warren’s Book Notes music playlist for her novella Going ...

2026-10-30T00:43:14Z

Kaaron Warren’s Book Notes music playlist for her novella Going to Summertime

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kaaron Warren’s Going to Summertime is an unsettling novella of friendship and greed.
Aurealis Magazine wrote of the book:
“Morbid and cajoling, sensual and startling. An astonishingly bizarre novella. And a treat for those finally encountering indomitable Warren’s rich and most peculiar stories.”
In her own words, here is Kaaron Warren’s Book Notes music playlist for her novella Going to Summertime:
Going to Summertime has two main settings. A hairdressing salon, where the four women work, and Summerland Place, the haunted cul-de-sac they go to explore. There’s no music in the cul-de-sac, except perhaps from faint strains coming from nearby houses, hints of living people going about the day.
It’s the salon that is rich with music. Every salon I’ve ever been in has had its own musical style. It might be the radio, or it might be a personal compilation.
In the Red Mullet Salon, the playlist depends on who’s working. Georgia will play music to suit the customer. Sunnie loves to sing and dance around like an angel. Erin loves rap music and swearing. Tamara loves the maudlin. Any song about death is all right by her.
Here’s a mix from all of them.
Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit
This is very much a Sunnie song, both thematically and musically.
Hill Top Hoods – Don’t Happy, Be Worry
A great Aussie band, been knocking out hits for about 20 years. This one is a ripper, one of those songs that sounds like it might be happy but is really not.
Amyl and the Sniffers – Big Dreams
Another great Aussie band. Amyl and the Sniffers hit all the buttons for Erin and for Tamara, who battle the others to play this music as often as they can.
Camille O’Sullivan – Hurt
They all love this one, especially after a difficult client. Sometimes they’ll play it low while the customer is still there.
The Angels – Dawn is Breaking
Australian pub band, the first band I ever saw live. I’m sneaking a few of my favourite songs in here, but that’s fine. This one brings back memories of friends, and friendship is an important element to Going to Summertime.
Tonada de Luna Llena – Mar Loi , Sara Sambola, and Irene Zugaza
This one’s for Sunnie. She has a beautiful voice; she could have been something. Instead, she’s cutting hair and trying to keep clean.
YNG Martyr – Die in the End
YNG Martyr hits the spot for Erin. Her mother hates this music, so she waits until she’s in the salon to blast it loud.
Ren – Hi Ren
All four women love this song, and they’ll sing it at the tops of the voices while cleaning up at the end of the day. Stumbling over the words, getting them wrong. They all take something different from it.
John Craigie – Helena
I haven’t named Sunnie’s mother, but I’m going to say Helena. This is how she feels about her mother, and she’s not wrong.
Smoke on the Water – Deep Purple
Their sleazy landlord, Felix, loves to sit in the salon and perv at them. He air guitars this song, like so many before him. He thinks it makes him attractive but it really doesn’t.
For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.
Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She has published six multi-award winning novels: Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole , Tide of Stone and The Underhistory, and seven short story collections, her most recent being Calvaria Fell, with Cat Sparks, from Meerkat Press. Her stories have been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and the Stoker, and appeared in both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’sYear’s Best anthologies. Her writing podcast Let the Cat In showcases ideas, objects, and inspirations
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Wendy Wimmer’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The ...

2026-10-29T01:29:39Z

Wendy Wimmer’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Doomscroller’s Companion

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Wendy Wimmer follows up her impressive story collection Entry Level with a debut novel, The Doomscroller’s Companion, that dazzles with its storytelling through a variety of narratives.
“Provocative. . . . An engaging novel in which ramped-up pandemic anxieties are reflected in online interactions, amid which choosing embodied connections proves best.”
Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:
In her own words, here is Wendy Wimmer’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Doomscroller’s Companion:
In late 2009, I went on a white shark cage diving trip to the Farallon Islands, a little-known wildlife refuge about 30 miles off San Francisco’s coastline. As luck would have it, I didn’t see any sharks (although others on our expedition did see several), but I spent that twelve hours staring up at this forbidden landscape of crumbling rocks, kelp flies and more sea birds and seals than you could count and thinking “If there was a zombie apocalypse, that would be the perfect refuge because no one would be trying to get on this island. They’d take one look and nope right the fuck out.” Or one smell, because the accumulated dense fog of bird and wildlife excrement and ammonia was almost visible.
Upon my return, I became obsessed with the history of the islands – the Egg War in the 19th century, the indigenous people, Juan Cabrillo and Sir Francis Drake, and became locked on the history of ecological nightmares inflicted on this beautiful collection of cliffs, shoals and secret caves. Not only were sea bird eggs pillaged to serve San Francisco’s breakfast tables (to the tune of 500,000 eggs a MONTH) and the fur seals hunted to extirpation, during the mid 20th century, the US government sunk over 44,000 containers of radioactive nuclear waste, as well as an entire radioactive Naval aircraft carrier – the USS Independence – next to the islands, and then named it a Wildlife Refuge. Sounds like us.
The one thing that all zombie movies have in common is that zombie movies don’t exist in those worlds. If they did, everyone would automatically know how to react when you saw a bunch of rotting corpses shambling toward you. Zombie movies and shows like The Last of Us and The Walking Dead have trained us to survive a zombie apocalypse, with those double taps, cardio tips, base building tips, etc. But what if a pandemic happened and everyone was so ready to go into zombie movie mode that they started murdering sick people?
Throughout the 2010s, I wrote and rewrote this novel, finishing it in fall of 2019 and started querying agents in February 2020. Instantly I had a lot of interest and then, well, that interest became very strong “not for me” once March 2020 hit. What happens when your super speculative novel becomes not at all speculative? It gets the benefit of psychological distance and then another rewrite.
A fun fact about me: Back before “blog” was a common word in our lexicon, back before the turn of the century (yes, the 1900s), I was writing about my life online (some of the older archives are still preserved at my website), hand coding the HTML because WordPress didn’t exist yet. I was a prehistoric, almost neolithic internet influencer. I even had some brand deals, a beauty closet filled with literally thousands of dollars in skin and beauty products, as well as a fashion closet filled with free clothes from indie fashion designers. Conde Nast hired me to build two of their dot com brands and paid handsomely for what I used to just give the internet for free. My work was featured in household name publications and websites, I appeared on nascent vlogs and video podcasts. It was surreal. Then the 2008 dot com crash changed everything – I lost three jobs, including my day job, in the span of eight days– and I was burned out by being what I called, “the internet’s liver.” I felt like I was filtering and metabolizing all the worst things into consumable forms. I stopped updating my own blog and rejected monetizing everything because it felt disingenuous. Jokes on me, I had earned so much Googlefu at that point, I probably could have just been a legit internet identity brand if I had cared more. And that was the genesis of Jane’s character – she’s what might have happened to me if I had pursued that path further, become loved and shared by millions and then struggled to invent more novelty to draw internet eyes and clicks.
Holocene – Bon Iver
In The Doomscroller’s Companion, both Jane and Brian are on separate islands, staring back at civilization as it begins to unravel, both from their vantage points and via webcams. Brian’s safe and protected on his island until the ice forms over the water and the island is now vulnerable to the people who are infected with the insomnia plague and are dealing with ambulatory coma-type situations. The world is reacting as though it’s a zombie apocalypse but it’s not actually zombies, they’re people who are ill, out of their minds with delusion and hallucinations. A fellow Wisconsinite, Bon Iver is capturing the coldness of the upper Midwest while being alienated and yearning for connection. “And at once, I knew I was not magnificent, strayed above the highway aisle, jagged vacance, thick with ice but I could see for miles, miles, miles.” The ever-beating thrum of Brian’s inner monologue is that he’s an imposter as an artist, flummoxed by his successes and constantly finding excuses for why it’s not his own talent that is driving his commercial success. Bon Iver sings “It’s a part of me apart from me” and “now to know it in my memory” – when the entirety of our social media stream is both us and not us at all, out of order, manipulated by an all-power algorithm that decides who is heard and seen and who is not.
Fun fact: My working title for The Doomscroller’s Companion was “Fake Internet Friends” – I knew I wasn’t going to keep that title, but I suspect it lingers just outside the margins, as real as the ghosts that share Jane’s bedroom on the Farallon Islands.
The Shins – Simple Song
This novel explores so much nostalgia for the Before Times, before we ever had this societal breakdown, the juxtaposition of Internet 2.0 with Internet 5.0, when our currency was in pretend internet popularity points, likes, follows and shares. Like so many moments of our lives, we don’t realize the importance of those glimpses until long after they have passed. I envision this song playing in the background of the scene set in the mid-Aughts, Jane riding a borrowed Fixie bicycle among the tech bros playing ultimate Frisbee on San Francisco’s Crissy Field. In that blog post, Jane describes to the internet: “And for one brief instant, while flying along this perfect bike path, I felt like I could peddle that way forever, making concentric circles around the peninsula, using hills and gravity to propel me into perpetual motion, like an executive desk toy. Click clack click clack I would never ever stop. It was a glorious moment. And then I wiped out.”
She has a high-side fall, this huge dramatic bike crash but no one seems to notice. In that moment, she falls out of love with San Francisco, her lucrative career in the tech boom, and faces who she believes she is, and what she believes she deserves out of life. Mercer, the songwriter and lead singer for The Shins, writes “I know that things can get really rough when you go it alone. Don’t go thinking you gotta be tough, and play like a stone. Could be there’s nothing else in our lives, so critical as this little home” Later in the novel, we see the moment again, only this time from Brian’s point of view – and we learn that it is the moment when they meet in real life, sending each of their fates into an intertwined online ‘e-lationship’ that will impact their lives in countless ways. They become each others’ online soulmates but both are too afraid to break the enchantment by meeting again in real life. As the song opines, “Love’s such a delicate thing that we do with nothing to prove, which I never knew” and “I told you about all those fears and away they did run You sure must be strong and you feel like an ocean made warm by the sun.” This song is that shiny feeling of meeting and clicking with someone and being just a little bit addicted to the world seen through they’re perception, and the image of you they are interacting with.
OneRepublic – Connection
Beyond my premise of zombie movies training us to react to a zombie-like scenario, my other working inspiration for the novel was that when the apocalypse happens, it will mostly be filtered through and to some extent, be felt through social media. The lyrics opine “There’s so many people here then why am I so lonely? Can I get a connection.” Beyond Jane and Brian’s textual relationship – which Jane calls their e-lationship – there’s the constant yearning of other characters who might or might not be known to us in the narrative. We see Jane’s named social media stream, we see one from Brian’s ex-girlfriend, but other characters exist only as their social media handles. Reddit posters write long theses about human colony collapse and encourage fellow Redditors to end it sooner than later, Google’s suggested search terms offer “why am I still here?” and “Can insomnia make you fat?” The social media streams are full of tiny stories from the lives of strangers, along with the number of likes, comments and shares. @Gemma1989 says “Just made friends with neighbor who has never spoken to me or met my gaze. I’ve only lived here for six and a half years and we share a driveway, so that was cool” while @MightyMych offers to pick up groceries for people who are unable to leave their houses and at one point says “If you’re lonely in lockdown and need someone to talk to, I’d love to hear from someone” which is hearted by 429 people but far fewer take her up on it. @DBmm talks about the people who have been lost to the pandemic, but without funerals “it’s like they’re still there, not answering my emails,” a sentiment hearted by 3.9K followers and shared 87 times.
The text lays out all these flailing attempts for connection that interject within Brian’s and Jane’s narratives, emails, chats and blog posts, a Greek chorus that reminds us that even when we’re alone, we are reaching out into the ether.
Half-alive – Everything Machine
The diptych to the social media element is the facet of technology and the algorithm that acts as both a censor and a feeder to what we consume. In every crisis, count upon the fact that we’ll be making jokes and using black humor to cope with the cognitive dissonance. Our cell phones have become “everything machines.” Of the insomnia plague, Brian says “We each hold tiny blue suns. up to our faces and then are surprised when our primate selves can’t get a decent moment’s rest.” These lyrics counter his disdain, arguing “I’m your second nature, never leave your side I’m a growing cancer (the feeling of sleepless nights), I’m your serotonin, I’m your burning eyes, Baby, don’t you cry, I’m right here tonight” and promise to “keep you close when it’s getting late” and “make you feel at home ‘til the pain is numb.” Are these machines helping or hindering our existence? Are they literally keeping us from connecting because we hold them between each other?
Stars – Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
Stars is one of my most favorite bands in the entire world, but I listened to this song repeatedly while drafting The Doomscroller’s Companion. It captures the intensity of connection and then moving on only to be faced with who you were in another lifetime – the duet between two people, one of whom was devastated by the loss and the other who can’t even remember the person’s name.
Jane details her romantic devastations online, displaying her self-incriminating inner dialogue for millions of readers. Her hunky tech bro was just never really going to be in love with her, despite the evidence she had clung to all along. In her blog, Jane writes, “That night, while drunk, he says he will never love anyone as much as he loved his first girlfriend. He says I’m unlike any woman he’s ever met. He says I’m special, someone he knows will be his best friend forever. Dear Reader, you may have already guessed he says these things out of order.”
In that scene, I was very much thinking of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan singing in heartbreaking harmony “I’m not sorry I met you, I’m not sorry it’s over, I’m not sorry there’s nothing to say.” Chris Seligman writes baroque pop operas, capturing these gorgeous and lonely moments with a sardonic French horn thru-line. We need more pop with melodicas and French horns, right? Maybe that’s just the marching band geek in me.
Fun fact Doomscroller trivia: the character Patty was named for Pat McGee, Stars’ drummer. McGee’s nickname is Paddy, but when I met him, I heard “Patty” and was so confused, like Jane is when she meets Patty for the first time.
The Cure – Plainsong
There are several cross-country road trips in my novel – I love a good road trip, especially one fueled by running away from or to something. I’ve crossed the country by automobile several times myself and I’m 99% ready to fully give up air travel in exchange for auto and train travel, because you just get to see everything up close and spend time in your own mind. When Jane embarks on one of those trips, the first thing she does is queue of The Cure’s Disintegration on the car’s stereo. The entire album is flawless, and while I probably wouldn’t rank Plainsong as my absolute favorite on the compilation, it feels like a disembarkation, a transition point (probably why it’s the first track). The lyrics are bittersweet, “I think I’m old and I’m feeling pain, ” you said “And it’s all running out Like it’s the end of the world, ” you said “And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead” Then you smiled for a second” It feels like a triumphant reclamation of the self. Sofia Coppola must agree, as she uses it to great effect in Marie Antoinette, as the titular character walks to her coronation.
Fun fact: When Billboard ranked The Cure’s top 40 songs, it put Plainsong fourth, calling it “a slowly unfolding poem for the apocalypse” and well, if someone said that about The Doomscroller’s Companion, I’d never stop talking about it.
Lucy Dacus – Night Shift
This song is all about the transition from disbelief and shock to anger post-breakup, which both Jane and Brian certainly go through on their own parallel but distinct paths. The lyrics are insistent that the singer is fine, she’s fine, she’s fine, even though the singer then asks in the chorus “let me kiss your lips so I know how it felt” and holding themselves responsible for their own actions, knowing that they will “walk for hours in the dark feeling all hell.” While Brian and Jane’s online relationship has never involved physical touch, they’ve been trapped in a stasis of a pretend situationship. Jane is afraid that her online persona is impossible to live up to in real life and doesn’t want to risk losing Brian’s friendship – or whatever it is – by meeting up in person again. She relies upon his memory of her during the one chance meeting, as the lyrics say, “forget you’ve ever saw me at my best… it’s too dangerous to fall so young, take back what you said, can’t lose what you never had.” In the novel’s opening scene, she thinks about Brian, “No one could live up to the persona I’ve created. Jane ’Ere is a goofy best friend that millions of people Like and Share. People rarely Like the real me… Disappointment flickering on Brian’s face after so many years. He’d try to hide it, but I’d see. I depend upon his foggy memory, a girl in Sa

https://largeheartedboy.com/2026/10/28/wendy-wimmers-book-notes-music-playlist-for-her-novel-the-doomscrollers-companion/

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Seth Fleisher’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The ...

2026-10-25T02:19:24Z

Seth Fleisher’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Farther Shore

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Seth Fleisher’s novel The Farther Shore is a deeply atmospheric and profound debut.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A compelling novel inspired by the pioneering naturalist Eugène Marais and his son, Charles, who was abandoned in the name of science…This is an absorbing work of historical fiction and an impressive and welcome debut.”
In his own words, here is Seth Fleisher’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel The Farther Shore:
Seth Fleisher’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel The Farther Shore
Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford said that the secret to being a successful novelist is never to have kids. (He didn’t put it precisely this way, but that’s always been my read of what he meant.) In any event, I have two. And at the time I started researching and then writing my debut novel, The Farther Shore, the two were on the smaller side. I also had a relatively full-time job with the World Bank Group that kept me busy and regularly traveling abroad. It struck me on more than one occasion that trying to write a book, raise great humans, and save the world might be mutually exclusive goals. Ten years later, having achieved two out of three feels like cause for celebration.
Every evening my wife and I took turns putting our kids to bed amid endless requests for one more song or one more book. Then, when they were finally settled, I’d steal away to Au Coquelet to work on the novel, alongside my regular late-night dinner order: a grilled chicken, mushroom, and jalapeño sandwich—an order that never got old—and a single pint of whatever happened to be on tap that night. Au Coquelet was one of the only establishments in downtown Berkeley open past midnight. Alas, it was also a COVID casualty—my favorite writing haunt has since been replaced by condos.
I rarely listen to music when I write. It distracts me from the rhythm and musicality I strive to build into prose. Plus, I have an internal playlist that rarely stops, even when I try my best to quiet it.
Here are some of the internal tunes I recall being on replay in those early days, some directly relevant to the novel, and some, well, less so.
Lake Street Dive: “Hypotheticals”
The novel begins with a hypothetical of sorts, or more precisely, a counterfactual: What if the protagonist had made one different decision? He might have salvaged a life. He might have saved his father.
Old Crow Medicine Show: “Methamphetamine”
That father—one of the two protagonists in the novel—is inspired by the historical South African naturalist Eugène Nielen Marais. In the novel, Marais is a morphine addict, as he was in real life. And while meth and morphine are drugs of completely different classes, the link feels salient. Plus the false cadence at the end of the chorus of this Old Crow tune still leaves me breathless each time I hear it.
Jason Isbell: “Children of Children”
This Jason Isbell song is an exploration of inheritance: what parents unintentionally transmit to their children, and the baggage children carry without ever having consented. In the novel, Marais is so devastated by personal tragedy that he abandons his infant son and disappears into a remote African forest where he studies and lives among a troop of chacma baboons. He is intent on discovering the origins of memory as a way of understanding his own psychic suffering. Decades later, that son, Charles Marais, now a professor of Buddhist history at Harvard, finds himself trapped by his father’s research—which has been co-opted by university faculty for sinister ends—and constrained by his own genetics.
Fokofpolisiekar: “Hemel op die Platteland”
The first song in Afrikaans ever playlisted on 5FM, a national South African radio station. At the time, it enraged conservative Afrikaners. Fokofpolisiekar is an Afrikaans punk band whose chief project was tearing apart white Afrikaner nationalist and religious identity, dismantling notions of inheritance—as the novel also sets out to do.
Richard Wagner: “Kaisermarsch”
Okay, this was not actually part of my internal playlist. It’s the one composition on this list that appears in the novel. Wagner composed Kaisermarsch in 1871 to crown the new German Empire. In 1935, as Marais’s son gradually comes to realize that senior leaders at the university are flirting with Nazi ideology, he confronts a band of students performing this Wagner composition in Harvard Yard, and things get ugly.
The New Basement Tapes: “Kansas City”
Topically, this one is not directly related to the story. But when Marcus Mumford takes on Bob Dylan, the result is perhaps the greatest earworm in the history of roots music. After hearing Mumford play this one live, it didn’t leave my internal playlist for at least a year.
Johnny Clegg: “The Crossing (Osiyeza)”
A white South African musician who croons in English and Zulu about crossing over to the other side, channeling western folk rock traditions while conjuring southern Africa. This theme of crossing over is embedded within the title of the novel, The Farther Shore. It comes from a curious line in the Buddhist Dhammapada: “Let go of the past, let go of the future, let go of the present and cross over to the farther shore.” For the novel’s protagonists, the crossings are both literal and metaphorical, as they travel the globe to find each other—and themselves.
Del McCoury: “I Need More Time”
A plaintive cry by one of the godfathers of bluegrass for more time to live. For me, it was a plea for more time to write. The two, I suppose, are not unrelated. But the song also forces us to consider how we choose to spend the shockingly few moments we have on this planet. Charles Marais, reflecting on this question, chooses to leave behind everything he’s built over decades in search of a more meaningful life.
Leonard Cohen: “Going Home”
Ultimately the novel is a story about the vast distances we’ll travel—across decades and continents—to find our way home. And Leonard Cohen merges Buddhist and Jewish identities with some of the most glorious poetry ever set to music: “He wants to write a love song / An anthem of forgiving / A manual for living with defeat.” Isn’t this also what Charles wants from his one precious and heartbreaking life? What all of us do?
________________________
Seth Fleisher is an American author whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Pearl, the Journal of Anthropological Research, and elsewhere. Based in Berkeley, California, he has worked with the World Bank Group and other NGOs in more than 40 other countries, and co-founded a U.S.-based democracy initiative to counter the rising tide of authoritarianism. A former Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka, Seth did Ph.D. work at Harvard in Buddhist social history, a fellowship at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and a B.A. in literature at Swarthmore, where he and his wife first met in a Chaucer seminar. The Farther Shore is his debut novel. You can visit him online at @sethfleisher and sethfleisher.com.
For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.
Seth Fleisher is an American author whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Pearl, the Journal of Anthropological Research, and elsewhere. Based in Berkeley, California, he has worked with the World Bank Group and other NGOs in more than 40 other countries, and co-founded a U.S.-based democracy initiative to counter the rising tide of authoritarianism. A former Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka, Seth did Ph.D. work at Harvard in Buddhist social history, a fellowship at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and a B.A. in literature at Swarthmore, where he and his wife first met in a Chaucer seminar. The Farther Shore is his debut novel. You can visit him online at @sethfleisher and sethfleisher.com.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

https://largeheartedboy.com/2026/10/25/seth-fleishers-book-notes-music-playlist-for-his-novel-the-farther-shore/

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Bradley Sides’s Book Notes music playlist for his novella The ...

2026-10-21T01:45:03Z

Bradley Sides’s Book Notes music playlist for his novella The Volcano Keeper

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
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.
Bradley Sides’s novella The Volcano Keeper is a moving fable of family and love.
The Southern Review of Books wrote of the book:
“Beyond clear-eyed descriptions of the world Charlie inhabits, the deeper beauty of this story is the way grief and life spin together like a thaumatrope (a spin art toy) to create a picture of love.”
In his own words, here is Bradley Sides’s Book Notes music playlist for his novella The Volcano Keeper:
It was August of 2023. My wife and I were leaving Mount Rainier National Park and headed toward Crater Lake National Park. I was processing all the grand beauty I’d observed from the past few days—this was the first time I’d seen a volcano, after all. Tyler Childers was on in our vehicle, as he often is, and there were volcanoes—majestic, terrifying, awe-inspiring volcanoes—surrounding us. I didn’t know it at the time, but I should have. A new book had been conceived.
For the longest time in my pre-writing phase, I sat with only the image. There was a volcano. There was a volcano. There was a volcano. But, then, it hit me. Finally, music was there, too, and the stories Tyler Childers was telling reminded me of my rural home. All of it. The laughter and joy and grace and loss and love. I had my inspiration for the world inside The Volcano Keeper, and I knew exactly where Charlie Melvin, my book’s protagonist, and his cattle farm, garden, and creek would be—exactly where all of his family, friends, and neighbors would be, too.
Without music, this book wouldn’t exist. I’d just have a volcano, but with no place to put it.
Here is the playlist to take you into The Volcano Keeper’s fictional Lynnville County, Alabama and the people who live there:
Tyler Childers’ “Universal Sound”
It’s the song that took me home—and the one that also helped find Charlie Melvin, the protagonist of my novella, his. “Universal Sound” really is the song of my life, and I think this book is the most me I’ll ever write.
Iris Dement’s “Let the Mystery Be”
So much of The Volcano Keeper is about belief. How it shapes us. How it enriches us. How it haunts us. This is my go-to song for contemplating belief.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s “Dreamsicle”
I structed my novella as a series of vignettes to reflect the hazy, brief, and fragmented reflection of memories. Isbell, with his Alabama history, helps me go back to the past—and to imagine Charlie’s, too.
Adrianne Lenker’s “Free Treasure”
I love Lenker’s work, both as a solo artist and with Big Thief. “Free Treasure” has to be on this playlist because it so tenderly looks at the value of love. The song feels like a celebration of those relationships we hold dear. I imagine some of the family scenes in The Volcano Keeper being like treasured photographs, and this beautiful song is what I hear in the background.
Mavis Staples’ “Sad and Beautiful World”
So much of The Volcano Keeper is about how we process grief. For Charlie, the beauty of the natural world is one of the ways. It’s a sad, sad world, but there’s so much absolute wonder and beauty.
Waxahatchee’s “Right Back to It” (feat. MJ Lenderman)
There’s a lot of water in my book, and I promise you, each time I listen to “Right Back to It,” I’m floating in the creek.
Watchhouse’s “Old Ties and Companions”
Time is fleeting, and we have to hold on to those we love. They won’t be here forever. The Volcano Keeper explores this idea more, and this song from Watchhouse captures that feeling so movingly.
Sierra Ferrell’s “Lighthouse”
Love, in its best form, can help us find our way. Charlie is lost a lot in my book. He’s searching and searching and searching. He believes he finds the titular object Ferrell sings of.
Valerie June’s “With You”
Valerie June’s “With You” is one of the greatest love songs ever written. I’ll believe that until I die. It’s a celebration—of love and of life. While The Volcano Keeper certainly has sadness and darkness, I hope, at the end of the day, it reads like a celebration.
Brandi Carlile’s “You and Me on the Rock”
I have to add one more great love song on here. The Volcano Keeper is set on literal rocks that keep expanding as the story goes further and further—and the love gets deeper and deeper.
Kacey Musgraves’ “The Architect”
I don’t want to give away too much of my book’s ending, but, as I’ve said, the journey of Charlie’s life is so much about belief. Who/what guides him? Does he even a guide? Musgraves’ “The Architect” asks these same questions…
The Avett Brothers’ “Murder in the City”
“Murder in the City” has one of my favorite lyrics of the band’s catalog: “Always remember there was nothing worth sharing / Like the love that let us share our name.” For a book so focused on family, this song has to be on this playlist.
Sturgill Simpson’s “Panbowl”
I imagine most of us have those songs that just make us tear up each time we hear them, no matter how many times we hear them. Welp, Sturgill Simpson’s “Panbowl” is one of mine. It’s so full of loss and longing and sadness and pain, but it’s mixed with so much love and beauty that it feels like it’s a whole damn album (or novel) in itself.
Sarah Kate Morgan’s “Heaven In My Mind”
I can think of no better song than the folk gem “Heaven In My Mind” from the incredibly-talented Sarah Kate Morgan to match the ending of The Volcano Keeper. This song transports us with such peace and beauty, and that’s the very thing I hope the ending of my little book does, too.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Bradley Sides’s playlist for his story collection Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood
Bradley Sides’s playlist for his story collection Those Fantastic Lives
For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.
Bradley Sides is the author of two previous short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, a 2024 Book of the Year finalist at Southern Literary Review. His writing appears at Chapter 16, Electric Literature, LeVar Burton Reads, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Rumpus, and Southern Review of Books, where he also serves as the host of “The Southern Summer Book Club.” He lives in Madison, Alabama, with his wife, and, on most days, he can be found teaching writing and literature at Calhoun Community College. His latest book is The Volcano Keeper.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

https://largeheartedboy.com/2026/10/20/bradley-sidess-book-notes-music-playlist-for-his-novella-the-volcano-keeper/

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Silas House’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Tulip ...

2026-10-19T22:05:10Z

Silas House’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Tulip Poplars

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
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.
Silas House’s The Tulip Poplars is an unforgettable, moving novel about forbidden love in Appalachia in the early 1900s.
Bookpage wrote of the book:
“Silas House’s The Tulip Poplars is a story of love between people that society says should not love each other . . . . The South, and the rural South in particular, is often flattened in stories. Here, the pain, beauty, danger and community of life in a small Southern town are all on full display. Amos, Tom, Paschal and Maeve find their voices as they fight for what matters―for the land, for their home and for their hearts.”
In his own words, here is Silas House’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Tulip Poplars:
Into My Arms – Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer (written by Nick Cave in 1997)
The novel takes place from 1918 to 1976 so this song came out long after that (this version in 2017) but it was the foundational song for my writing of this novel. I played it every single time I sat down to write and it helped to put me in the mindframe I needed to write a love story, which is the main way I thought of this novel from its beginning. It’s a perfect love song because it is so incredibly romantic and full of love but never strays into sentimentality. And the way it folds in religion also serves this book as well. Besides all of that, the vocal delivery from sisters Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne is absolutely transcendent, as is the production by Teddy Thompson.
Little Darling Pal of Mine – Lucinda Williams
This song works for a gay romance because no pronouns are used for the person being sung to. Amos sings it at a gathering early on in the novel and he could have easily been singing it to Tom without anyone knowing. Although it’s using “pal” to suggest a friendship the romance in it is clear. The Carter Family’s version is perhaps the best known but I’m partial to Lucinda Williams’ version.
Be Thou My Vision – Choir of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh
The Episcopal church is important throughout this book so I listened to a lot of choirs singing classic hymns while writing those scenes. There’s something transportive about the vocals that put me in those scenes in a dreamlike way, so I hope that happens for the readers who listen to these songs as well.
You’ll Miss Lots of Fun When You’re Married – John Philip Sousa, Paul Sperry, and Irma Vallecillo
I did a lot of research on music of the 1920s, especially songs that might have been sung in speakeasies and in gay gathering places. This was one of the more popular ones and it certainly applies to both Tom and Maeve’s situations since they are thrust into a marriage unexpectedly and not totally by choice. Plus, it’s fun to listen to and really helped me to enter the spaces of the night clubs of New York City during the time period.
I’m Always Chasing Rainbows – Charles Harrison
This song also helped me to get into the New York City scenes easily. Today many of associate rainbow imagery with the LGBTQ rights movement and Pride efforts and the lyrics of this song work perfectly with some pivotal scenes in the novel.
My Buddy – Henry Burr
This is a famous song that has so much gay innuendo in it that I’m convinced that the writer meant it as a gay romance, so I had to use it. The use of the term “my buddy” is just so coded and unusual for a romantic song, and even if it wasn’t intended that way it certainly works for this book. So many gay couples at the time had to pretend to be “just friends” or “roommates”.
Cielito Lindo – Los Panchos
I wanted this to be a novel that shows rural America in a different way. I think readers expect that the rural South, and particularly Appalachia, is a place populated solely by poor white folks but in this novel there are people of color and immigrants because that is true of the place during this time period. One of the groups that brought influential music into the region during this time were Mexican laborers who came to work in the vegetable and tobacco fields at the time as part of the Braceros program. I love the scenes with these workers, especially when they gather at night to play the homesick music of their homeland.
Gymnopédie No. 1 – Erik Satie, Phillippe Entremont
I think of this as the love score of this novel, and I played it repeatedly while writing it. There are few pieces of music that are more romantic. Since the piano is a central image from the very beginning of the novel it works well to have this piano-based score as a central theme of the book. One of my favorite scenes in the book shows Tom being so heartbroken by listening to this song that his wife realizes he is in love with someone else—the person who bought him the record. I loved writing that scene and certainly listened to the song dozens of times while doing so.
Just One Look – Doris Troy
The book covers a long period of time—more than sixty years—so as we get toward the end of the novel I am able to bring in songs from the fifties, sixties, and even early seventies. This is one I thought worked well for a scene where the lead characters are visiting a gay bar for the first time. It’s another romantic song that feels upbeat and very much of the time period, so it enables me as the writer and others as the readers to easily travel to that time.
All My Trials – Peter, Paul and Mary
This is a novel about two couples whose love is legislated. Their romances are illegal in the time and places where they live. Neither of them are able to marry for most of the time the book covers. They face incredible obstacles and dangers to be together. They know that their love could lead to them being killed. I find this song so moving and it made me think a lot about what these couples have to overcome just to be who they are. It shows up late in the book but is nonetheless epitomizing of the theme throughout.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Silas House’s music playlist for his poetry collection All These Ghosts
Silas House’s playlist for his novel Southernmost
For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels and one book of creative nonfiction. His latest book is Southernmost (June 2018), which has been long listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a top ten Southern bestseller and in July 2020 his first three books were reissued with new supplemental material, including new forewords, author notes, and a family tree.
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Lance Olsen’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel An ...

2026-10-16T05:56:24Z

Lance Olsen’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
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.
Lance Olsen’s reimagining of the life of artist Henry Darger, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies, is at once both tragic and transcendent.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Olsen (Absolute Away) gives voice to outsider artist Henry Darger, who died in 1973, in this admirable narrative…It’s an arresting portrait of a troubled figure.”
In his own words, here is Lance Olsen’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies:
Henry Darger (1892-1973) is one of those fascinating, secret-handshake, so-called outsider artists. I’m always startled and made glad how many small pockets of people know about him these days. I’m always startled and forlorn nobody knew about him when he was alive, saw a single one of his 350 unearthly collages, read a word of his extravagantly long novels (one measures 15,145 pages) until he was on his deathbed.
For decades Henry spent his days as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals, his nights writing and making art that rendered the horrific adventures of the Vivian Girls, whose mission it was to rescue a smashed world filled with child slaves.
Because he left few traces behind besides his work, extraordinarily little is known for sure about his life, except that he existed hand to mouth for most of his 81 years in a cluttered 17.6-by-13.9 room at a boardinghouse, living as near to a solitary, repetitive existence as possible—except in his fiery imagination.
Henry simply wasn’t interested in attention, even less so in fame.
He created for no one save himself—and to save himself.
So how can you not want to write about somebody like that, spend a few years trying to speculate about and empathize with such a singular mind?
That curiosity and compulsion caught me when I stumbled across the first major comprehensive exhibition of his work at the American Folk Art Museum in New York in 1997. Twenty-seven years later I wrote the first line of my novel An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies: “Sometimes in the morning I remember thinking: it is the sorrow of leaving a place you’re not done loving yet.”
It’s a novel interested in exploring Henry’s radical interiority, his non-sequitur imagination, through an intensely subjective first-person point of view. At its heart beat questions about for whom we really create at the end of the day; about reading as problem; about the importance of serious art as a hospital for soothing hurt rather than a business privileging quantity over quality.
Thirteen chapters. A song around each:
“Lost Girls” (Tilly and the Wall, 2006)
Based on Henry’s Vivian Girls, this one provides one of the epigraphs for An Inventory—
And your eyes are like screaming
And since there is no end, and no beginning
You will run
You will run
You will run
—and collars the atrocity exhibition called Henry’s childhood, when his disabled father had his eight-year-old son institutionalized at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children for masturbating too much.
One of the fun research corners for me was discovering how many songs have been written about him by everybody from Natalie Merchant (“The Ballad of Henry Darger,” 2001) and the German indie band Get Well Soon (“Just Like Henry Darger,” 2012) to the noise-rock Lungbutter (“Henry Darger,” 2019) and Philippe Cohen Solal and Mike Lindsay’s concept album, OUTSIDER (2021), whose lyrics are appropriated from Henry’s writing.
“Another Brick in the Wall” (Pink Floyd, 1979)
At the asylum, he suffered acute negligence, beatings, and quite possibly rape at the hands of both the staff and his fellow inmates. Because of Illinois’s overcrowded prison system, adult criminals were housed with the children. Once you were institutionalized, the thinking at the time went, you would never leave. They were all just bricks in the wall.
“Fast Car” (Tracy Chapman, 1988)
So almost from the minute he arrived, Henry, being Henry, began planning his escape. It took him six years and four attempts before he succeeded, at which point he walked the 165 miles back to Chicago, no fast cars in sight. Starting from zero, he had nothing to lose.
“Not Strong Enough” (boygenius, 2023)
It’s difficult to tell for certain from the shadows he left in his wake, but it’s possible Henry was autistic, certain he lived most of his life as an impoverished misanthrope, and probable he was gay in a culture whose erasure of such identities was very close to absolute—even as he attended Catholic mass several times a day to beat down the fiends inside him, packed his room with religious memorabilia, and carried on a lifelong wrestling match with his furious god, because he didn’t know why he was the way he was.
“I Want You (Fever)” (Momma, 2025)
A year or two after he returned to Chicago, Henry met a man named William Schloeder (whom Henry sometimes referred to in his writings as “Willie,” sometimes as “Whillie), a nightguard thirteen years older than he, and entered a several-decades-long relationship with him. It’s conceivable Schloeder and he were just friends. It’s likely they were lovers. Schloeder lived with his mother and sisters, and seems to have tried to distance himself geographically from Henry more and more, finally moving with one sister to San Antonio. Early on, Henry went so far as to look into the possibility of adopting a child that Schloeder and he could raise together.
“Baby” (Warpaint, 2010)
Although they never saw each other again after Schloeder left Chicago, Henry never stopped thinking about him, was crushed when Schloeder’s sister wrote him a brief postcard to let him know his friend/lover had died of the flu. Henry wrote Schloeder into his novels, into the elaborate mythology he created, so Schloeder could continue to live as a hero in the book of Henry’s fantasy.
“Lola” (The Kinks, 1970)
Sexuality in Henry’s work was mystery and polyphony. Although he calls his protagonists the Vivian Girls, constructs them by collaging cartoons of girls out of magazines, comic books, tracts about the Civil War, and so on, he also lovingly freehands a penis on each.
“Bookends” (Simon & Garfunkel, 1968)
Which is to say the Vivian Girls were also stand-ins for Henry, for the injuries he abided as a child, hermaphroditic projections of the Henry that wanted to emancipate the child slaves of the world, which is to say emancipate himself, over and over again, for he learned trauma never follows a neat linear narrative arc. Trauma is perpetual bramble, tangle, fright, and briefly won fights. Your memories—they’re all that’s left you.
“My Body is Falling Apart” (Daisy, 1992)
Having no access to health care, Henry’s body slowly, painfully undid itself. By the time he was in his forties, he had pulled most of his teeth. He faced chronic stomach distress, chronic leg misery, chronic eye misery, increasing senility. He was bedridden for months when hit by a car in 1969, only to recover long enough to slip on the ice at the bottom of his boardinghouse steps. His landlords, the Lerners, helped him move into a nearby Catholic nursing home operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor.
“When It’s Cold Outside I’d Like to Die” (Moby, sung by Jacob Lusk, 2026)
What I especially love about this song is Lusk’s voice, which captures the stunning, eerie altérité of pure Henryness. When his neighor, David Berglund, was cleaning out Henry’s apartment for the Lerners after he had been moved to the Little Sisters of the Poor, he stumbled across Henry’s collages and writing in a trunk and stacked here and there. On a visit to the nursing home the next day, David told Henry about his find. “Throw it all away,” Henry responded. “Too late now.” He died the day after his eighty-first birthday and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Now an artwork by him sells for upwards of $800,000.
“My Way” (Frank Sinatra, 1969)
In my eyes what’s beautiful and grievous about Henry was his unwillingness to bend. He was a recluse. He was a grouch. He was hurt terribly by the world. He was continuous ache and sorrow. He made his art for an audience of one—maybe two, if he showed any of it to William Schloeder. He had no use for the opinion of others. He followed his own rhythms. And it broke him. His isn’t the story of transcendence, recovery, resolution, except as Kafka might have imagined it.
“Heroes” (David Bowie, German version 1977)
Here let us pay homage to Henry’s ancestry. His father, a tailer, was a German immigrant from Meldorf, a town in western Schleswig-Holstein. His mother, who died giving birth when Henry was four, was born in Wisconsin. Henry always told people he had been born and raised in São Paulo because he thought that sounded more enigmatic and stylish. In his room late at night, he would sometimes sing to himself in a madeup version of Portuguese. He was a kind of a hero. Nur diesen Tag. But just for one day.
“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” (Monty Python, sung by Eric Idle 1970)
Because only Eric Idle can be happy hanging on a cross.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel Always Crashing in the Same Car
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel Skin Elegies
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel My Red Heaven
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel Dreamlives of Debris
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his book [[ there. ]]
Lance Olsen’s playlist for his novel Theories of Forgetting
For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.
Lance Olsen is author of more than 30 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels Absolute Away (Dzanc, 2024) and Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie (FC2, 2023). He is a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, Connecticut Artistic Excellence Grant, and a Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

https://largeheartedboy.com/2026/10/14/lance-olsens-book-notes-music-playlist-for-his-novel-an-inventory-of-benevolent-butterflies/