Nina Schuyler’s collection In This Ravishing World, awarded the The Prism Prize for Climate Literature, is filled with engaging stories of natural beauty and individuals’ fights to preserve it.
Karen Joy Fowler wrote of the book:
“In this ravishing book, you will find stories that lift your heart and stories that break it. Powerfully beautiful and beautifully powerful, Schuyler has written exactly the book this moment needs.”
In her own words, here is Nina Schuyler’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection In This Ravishing World:
In writing In This Ravishing World, I thought of it as a full-throated chorus—scientists, dreamers, escapists, artists, activists, children, and, yes, Nature, too—gathered around the fire/drought/tornado/flood of the climate emergency. To my ear, each story is played in a different rhythm and evokes a different mood and atmosphere, but a certain passionate refrain soars: the astonishingly exquisite beauty of the world.
Radiohead: Reckoner
This song floats over the entire collection, enveloping everyone and everything. It’s a reckoning, a settlement, an account, a bill long overdue. As the lyrics of Reckoner lament, “dancing for your pleasure,” The song turns me inward to confront the harsh realities and lays them bare. The collection, too, ultimately strips it all away, and every character, in some way or another, confronts the most challenging thing humans have ever faced: climate change.
Helene Volgelsinger: Patch Notes
In her YouTube video, Volgelsinger sits in a dilapidated house, its windows ajar, paint peeling off, and creates her haunting, hypnotic music on a modular synthesizer. Her laser-focus on the creative process reminds me of the group of techies in the story, ‘Brethen and Sistren,’ who, like her, are plunged deep in their work, writing code for hours on end, hacking and cracking, striving to dismantle the System.
Run Lola Run (soundtrack) Running Two
This frenetic beat is Hugh’s heartbeat, fast, relentless–he’s a man in the short story “Paradise” who madly, desperately, urgently wants to escape the climate crisis—anywhere but here, anywhere but California’s wildfires and floods and droughts. “Thoughts of what’s coming are like a pack of ravenous wild wolves nipping at his heels.” He wants to save his family from harm, and he wants so badly to find the escape hatch. Where is it? Who hid it? Jesus, someone tell me.
Antonique Smith: Mercy Mercy Me
Her soaring voice, wrapping around each word, revives and refreshes Marvin Gaye’s classic. She hits the high notes and the low notes, singing loudly and lovingly about the earth. It’s what Lincoln, a young boy in a blighted urban neighborhood tries to do: revive and refresh the housing project by bringing green to the urban setting. “His whole body needs to see that deep green up on the hill and color splashed everywhere.”
U2: Beautiful Day
Oh, yeah, because throughout this book, there’s a big love for the earth, the beauty that, if you slow down and look, you’ll see it. The lyrics say, The heart is a bloom/shoots up from the stony ground. That’s right, there’s hope and people are putting bodies on the line to save this beautiful planet. It’s a beautiful day/don’t let it get away.
Aretha Franklin: Bridge Over Troubled Water
I keep hearing Aretha Franklin’s voice in this collection, the way it pierces, a tunnel beyond the intellect and rationalization, straight to the soul or the spirit or whatever you call it. This is the kind of voice that Nature wishes for, something that moves the human body to love the earth, to care for the earth, in the same way the earth has cared for humans. Says Nature: “Maybe I need to say something comforting so you relax, and the words slip in like beautiful music.”
Neil Young: On the Beach
In the story “Our Days of Grace,” Lucinda may need a crowd of people, as Neil Young sings, but she can’t face them day-to-day. Every spare non-working hour, she drives herself to the dog shelter and hangs out with the rejects, the ones thrown out the door or on the freeway. The dogs are shy or shaky or scared of people. Oh, Lucinda understands. She walks the dogs and sits with them and reads to them. “She can hear their burning desire to run and sizzle their brains with the smell of tall green grass.”
Foo Fighters: The Pretender
Jake has to face a terrifying fear because, as the lyrics say, he’s “finished making sense.” But see, in the story “Muscular Activity,” he sort of lied, and now he’s in a predicament, his face smashed against his worst fear. He’s climbing, and he’s terrified of heights. This song is for Jake to give him courage. Hold on tight.
Florence + the Machine: Dog Days Are Over
More than anything, Ava, in the story “Bargain,” wants the dog days to be over, which she thinks of as hard days, difficult days filled with ecological disaster, but they aren’t, and it doesn’t seem like they’ll be over anytime soon. She wants a baby, but how can she bring a baby into this collapsing world? Maybe if she keeps singing this song, those doggy days will be over, and the sun will shine, and the air will be clean and pure, and the water as clear as air.
U2: Pride (In the Name of Love)
Ed, a ballet dancer in the story “The Object of Dancing,” has to become a rat for a performance, not just dress like one, but think like one. He’s in the brightly lit studio, warming up to this song, moving, dancing with his eyes closed, spinning, lost in the dream of this song–almost. If only he could stop thinking about Henry, “who has legs that reach up to his armpits and his quads bulge in the most beautiful, sculpted way.”
LCD Soundsystem: new body rhumba
A chaotic, upbeat song pulsing with longing, a longing for a new body, a perfect song for the end of this collection that spins like the earth itself from one character’s point of view to another. “I need a new body,” everyone sings loudly, “I need a new body to push away the end.” Then, toward the end of the song, as in the collection, there is movement, something is happening, something good. “Don’t go to the light…go into the light.”
Nina Schuyler’s novel, Afterword, was published in 2023. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her nonfiction book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, is a bestseller. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and the University of San Francisco. She lives in California.