In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Mahreen Sohail’s collection Small Scale Sinners is filled with unforgettable and audacious young women protagonists.
Garth Risk Hallberg wrote of the book:
“Mahreen Sohail’s debut offers the same thrill as celebrated first collections by Jamel Brinkley and Colin Barrett and Yoon Choi: the pleasure of watching a singular sensibility awaken to its own expression. In these pages, a flawless eye for detail meets a daring instinct to tack and swerve and startle; stories rewrite themselves paragraph by paragraph and sometimes in the space of a single phrase, always following the pulse of life. Small Scale Sinners is wonderful on sisterhood, on sex, on Pakistan, on coming of age… It brought me to the “plasma level of happiness.””
In her own words, here is Mahreen Sohail’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Small Scale Sinners:
I never listen to music when I write. To make this playlist, I wondered what the characters in my stories – mostly women yearning for a life that contained some version of agency within it – would enjoy listening to. I realized after I’d put the playlist together that many of these songs have a story behind them of a woman triumphing (sometimes the woman triumphing is me, as you’ll read below). That pleased me. I hope you’ll enjoy the songs below. I think the women in my short stories would like them too.
I love this song, but mostly I love this song because of this YouTube video of Pharrell looking first bored then interested then surprised then delighted while wearing a hat that inexplicably says PLANT as Maggie Rogers, a student, sits next to him waiting for his critique. In the video, she nervously tries hard at first to stay poker-faced and then slowly forgets where she is. She begins to nod her head to the beat, you can tell she knows her work is good. I love the video of her being discovered maybe more than the song. Mostly because I think it doesn’t happen very often, most of us don’t get one moment that changes our lives, instead we plod along and change or success comes slowly, if at all. Even though Maggie Rogers surely put in a lot of hours, days, and nights in isolation building up to this moment, it’s extremely gratifying to see her have a single, obvious moment of triumph.
In the first few months after he was born, my son hated the car seat, he’d scream anytime he was in it. The only thing that would stop him was me humming this song. The times when the humming worked – he stopped screaming – I felt like a real mother. It only worked when I did it, off key, from the front seat, while driving. That was a big win for me in those early, confused days. The opening bars still remind me of me surviving those first few months of his life.
Moon River (cover) by Frank Ocean
Is this cover of Moon River better than the original? Yes. I love this song. I listened to it on repeat while taking walks. I can imagine the sisters in Basic Training listening to this in their car, I can imagine the woman walking with her goat on the street in The Newlyweds listening to it. It’s slow and sad and also strangely joyful. I also always sing the opening bars wrong: Moon River/ wider than the sun, but it is actually wider than a mile and both versions give me pleasure.
You Were Meant For Me by Jewel
Has anyone ever been more heartbroken than Jewel in 1995? No! I love this song. It’s nostalgic but the beat still manages to convey hopefulness. I also love this song’s video. Jewel staring sadly at the camera. Her talking about the eggs and pancakes always surprised me. Like me, Jewel also ate eggs and pancakes! I think often of the difference between being earnest and/or sentimental in fiction and am always trying to avoid sentimentality in my work. This song is sentimental though, and also earnest, and still very charming. I wonder if there’s a way to carry that over to fiction. You Were Meant for Me also feels like the younger, poppier, more hopeful sister of the next song on my playlist…
I secretly believe that anyone who pretends to hate this song is lying. Who amongst us hasn’t felt like saying exactly this and stopped ourselves after being heartbroken? The best thing about this song? If Adele is singing it means she’s already reached the other side, found a way to communicate her pain and in doing so has turned it into art. I almost (almost) feel sorry for whoever she’s singing about. Weirdly, it makes me think of the son and the mother in the short story Hair, not the daughter who more obviously gets her heart broken. The center of the song is the absence it circles. The video this song is linked to above is my favorite live performance of Adele singing it.
Sanson ki Maala Pe by Ustaad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
I have a very clear memory of my father listening to this. I love this song in his memory, and it always reminds me of caretaking. Many of the women in my stories are caretakers of society, of each other, of their parents. Maybe they like listening to it too. My father loved Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and when we were younger and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was still alive, he used to tell us he would take a day off for his funeral to mourn the loss of such a huge artist privately. In this and in many other ways my father taught me that art-making and artists were to be revered.
Mahreen Sohail was born in Pakistan. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied as a Fulbright scholar; and was a Writing Fellow at A Public Space and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her work has appeared in Granta, the Kenyon Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology (XLII), and elsewhere. She lives in Washington DC.