“Music was always in the background when I was shaping this novel.”
“If I can be very honest with you, I never pay that much attention to the lyrics of songs, which is kind of ironic considering that I am a woman of letters. I am drawn to atmosphere first and foremost. It is also my approach in writing—rather than plot, I focus on emotions and feelings, the atmosphere of things. I rely on music to help me build this atmosphere.”
“Since the significant action of Pocketful of Poseys begins with the matriarch of the Posey clan hitching up to the legendary Woodstock music festival in August of 1969, any soundtrack of her family narrative would predictably overflow with songs from that epic long weekend.”
“Of course Idlewild has a soundtrack – it’s a novel about theater kids. I suppose it’s a universal tendency, not unique to theater kids, to imagine your life as a movie and yourself as the star. But theater kids are extra annoying about it, because their movie is a musical.”
“In I Quit Everything, I document my experiment of kicking a bunch of addictive habits and investigate the cultural influences—mostly songs and movies—that helped define my relationship to intoxication and addiction”
“Besides Kafka himself, these short pieces owe something to the Twilight Zone and also the Tamla and Stax soul 45s of the ‘60s.”
“I honestly cannot grok how the great Sue Grafton was able to write so many of her Kinsey Millhone novels — after this duo, I’m pretty much spent.”
“Set across several decades in and around a small New Jersey town, my novel Ex-Members follows the shifting fortunes of several characters over the years. It’s no surprise, then, that this playlist will be a bit heavy on the music of the Garden State. It’s also a touch melancholy, with some parts you can mosh to — just like Ex-Members.”
“The opening story does in miniature what the collection does en masse—permits the sprawl of Haitian life, Haitian disgust, Haitian joy, Haitian consciousness to cover as much geographical, emotional, and imaginative ground as is needed.”
“While writing short stories, I used to gobble candy and listen to fast-paced rap. But when I started to work on my first novel Fishing for The Little Pike, I needed both the music and the snack to match this new bigger scale prose.”