In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The stories and novella in Emily Greenberg’s collection Alternative Facts manage to embrace absurdity and empathy at the same time in this timely book.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A bold and often eerie set of tales that skillfully explore life’s what-if complexities.”
In her own words, here is Emily Greenberg’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Alternative Facts:
My debut short story collection, Alternative Facts, imagines the inner lives of the politicians, celebrities, artists, and entertainers who have ushered in our post truth-era, teasing the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, public and private, reality and simulation.
Beyond my writing practice, I also make experimental films and visual art, and several of my family members are involved in theater, music, and audio fiction. Naturally, I have always been interested in people who make things, and these interests tie in to Alternative Facts’ larger thematic concerns related to representation, performance, and mediation. As a result, many stories in the collection also speak to other art forms, including painting, photography, film, and yes, music. Creating a playlist for Alternative Facts was therefore both a fun challenge and a natural extension of the book’s engagement with other artistic mediums.
Without further ado then, here’s a playlist of eleven songs related to both my writing process and the six stories and one novella in my debut collection:
“First Breath After a Coma” by Explosions in the Sky
Because I have difficulty ignoring background noises in my environment while I write, I often rely on music to block them out, especially instrumental music to prevent myself from mixing the song lyrics with my own words. For many years, my go-to writing album has been The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place by the post-rock quartet Explosions in the Sky. As soon as I hear the opening notes to “First Breath After a Coma,” my brain knows it’s time to “wake up” from my non-writing coma and take a long, deep writing breath.
“Too Too Too Fast” by Ra Ra Riot | Story: “Alternative Facts”
The first and titular story in my collection is a single, twelve page long sentence written in the voice of Kellyanne Conway. As Trump’s former campaign manager and advisor, Conway gained a reputation for lying and speaking “Too Too Too Fast,” making it difficult for journalists to challenge her in real time. In my story, which takes place during Trump’s first inaugural ball, I wanted to capture Conway’s rapid-fire pace and contradictory speaking style, her quick pivots and see-sawing maneuvers around the truth. As indie rockers Ra Ra Riot put it in their 2008 debut album, The Rhumb Line, “We’re feigning words in the place / Of people we used to know.”
“Black Box” by Stan Walker | Story: Black Box
Next up, my story “Black Box” begins with a four-part definition of “black box” across different fields. In psychology, the term “black box” refers to the behaviorist view that mental processes are not legitimate objects of study, a perspective later hardened by the radical behaviorist B.F. Skinner, who excluded both inner experiential and physiological processes to focus only on external and observable behaviors. Told through a series of boxed vignettes, my story “Black Box” attempts to crack open Skinner’s “black box” as he attempts to build various utopias, fails to write a novel, and struggles in his interpersonal relationships. Of course, the term “black box” also refers to the small machine that determines the cause of a plane crash and applies metaphorically both to my story and to Australian Idol winner Stan Walker’s song about the aftermath of a messy relationship.
“All Systems Go / The Launch” by James Horner | Story: “Houston, We’ve Had a Problem”
In the third story in my collection, a film professor suffers a devastating brain injury that results in a mysterious speech disorder: he can now only speak lines from popular movies such as Apollo 13. “Houston, we have a problem,” he says, channelling Tom Hanks whenever he needs assistance from his caregiver. Composer James Horner’s iconic and critically acclaimed score for the 1995 film about the Apollo 13 space mission—at once heroic and tense—provides the ideal soundtrack to my story.
“False Alarm” by The Weeknd | Story: “Lost in the Desert of the Real”
On January 13, 2018, a false emergency alert ordering Hawaiians to seek shelter from an inbound ballistic missile was accidentally sent out across the state. It took another thirty-eight minutes for a second alert to go out informing Hawaiians that the previous message was a “false alarm.” A collage of text and image, my story “Lost in the Desert of the Real” recounts both real and imagined incidents surrounding the 2018 false missile alert alongside a discussion of the 1998 film The Truman Show. Released just two years prior to the incident, The Weeknd’s “False Alarm” describes a woman as intriguing as she is hollow, someone who is all surface but no substance.
“4 Minute Warning” by Radiohead | Story: “Lost in the Desert of the Real”
Radiohead’s “4 Minute Warning” directly references a Cold War-era British alert system capable of providing an approximately four minute warning before incoming Soviet nuclear attacks. Lasting just a few seconds over four minutes, the song evokes the nightmarish unreality of hearing such a warning. Just as the people depicted in my story (and in real life) sought shelter from what they believed was a real incoming missile, Thom Yorke sings about “Running from the bombers / Hiding in the forest / Running through the fields.”
“American Idiot” by Green Day | Story: “Tonight Show”
Six years after his disastrous presidency, George W. Bush appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to discuss his new retirement hobby: painting. While many media figures interpreted Bush’s paintings as evidence of the ex-president’s remorse or soul-searching—eagerly rehabilitating Bush’s public image—I was less convinced. During his presidency, Bush had shown remarkably little capacity for introspection. Did he even have an interior life? If he did, what might it look like, and why would he refuse to engage with it? My story “Tonight Show,” which includes scenes from Bush’s appearance on The Tonight Show, wrestles with these questions and the way Bush tailors his public persona for television audiences. Pair it with Green Day’s classic protest song about “one nation controlled by the media” and the “American Idiot” who led it.
“Pictures at an Exhibition” by Death Cab for Cutie | Story: “From the Eyes of Travelers”
My story “From the Eyes of Travelers” takes place at a photography exhibition opening in Ankara, Turkey. Possibly inspired by an 1874 piano suite of the same name by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, Death Cab for Cutie’s song describes the “plastic people with plastic hearts and smiles” at the gallery in my story.
“Pictures of You” by The Cure | Story: “From the Eyes of Travelers”
After witnessing and photographing an assassination at the gallery, the main character in the story, a fictionalized version of AP photojournalist Burhan Ozbilici, grapples with the flaws inherent in all his photos: “They do not just tell a story. They show a point of view. They have always shown a point of view.” As Ozbilici realizes over the course of the story, it is impossible to objectively capture reality, which is always filtered through the photographer’s subjectivity. A similar idea is expressed in the opening lines of The Cure’s “Pictures of You” when Robert Smith sings, “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you / That I almost believe that they’re real.”
“Gravity’s Rainbow” by Klaxons | Story: “The Author and the Heiress”
Last but not least, “The Author and the Heiress” imagines a meeting between the celebrity Paris Hilton and the reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon. The novella begins and ends with the famous first and last sentences of Pynchon’s magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow, which the English band Klaxons paid homage to in their 2007 song of the same name. However, in my novella, “a screaming comes across the sky” doesn’t refer to a rocket but to Paris Hilton screaming her lungs out as she falls from a helicopter onto Thomas Pynchon’s Manhattan fire escape.
“Stars are Blind” by Paris Hilton | Story: “The Author and the Heiress”
During a pivotal scene in “The Author and the Heiress,” Tom tells Paris about the origins of his reclusiveness. After his first novel, V., published to critical acclaim, Time sent a photographer to take his picture in Mexico City, forcing him to flee to Guanajuato and to go into hiding to protect his privacy. A frequent target of the “paparazzi” herself, Paris can certainly sympathize with Tom’s plight and decides to sing him a song to cheer him up. In earlier drafts of “The Author and the Heiress,” the fictional character Paris sang lyrics from the real Paris Hilton’s pop song “Stars Are Blind.” Though I eventually cut the lyrics from my novella to avoid permissions issues, the lines “Some people never get beyond their stupid pride / But you can see the real me inside, and I’m satisfied” still perfectly capture this vulnerable moment in the narrative.
Emily Greenberg is the author of Alternative Facts (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2025). Her writing has appeared in the Iowa Review, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She edits short story and flash fiction collections for Split/Lip Press and the “Lest We Forget the Horrors” series for McSweeney’s. Learn more at emilygreenberg.net.