“I think of these songs as calling to me and my stories in turn responding in a conversation across space, time, and borders.”
Category: Author Playlists
“I imagine that after Ed’s regrettable ska/punk phase, he got into a bit of a punk/hardcore phase. This seems like the natural progression to me for rock music kids in the ’90s.”
“I sometimes wonder if my novel makes the most sense when read aloud. The tension between the human and the natural when spoken is so much more apparent than on the page.”
“The novel is about an off-the-grid metal artist who welds sculptures out of the discards of this often-disregarded region. It is also a novel about stepmothers and daughters, and about cultural estrangement, the painful divides between where I live now, in New York, and where I return often to visit my family in rural Pennsylvania.”
“My poems often try to render the ordinary strange, and the strange ordinary.”
“My playlist for Confidence reflects the boom-and-bust instability of all-consuming limerence: when it’s good you’re unassailable, and when it’s bad you’re either in major trouble or about to be.”
“Five Conversations About Peter Sellers is an essay in conversation – five narrators carrying on five threads, all related to Peter Sellers and how his outsize ego derailed production of the 1960s James Bond spoof, Casino Royale.”
“In moments you will laugh at the absurdity of their world, and in other moments the darkness will feel all too familiar…”
“…with a few exceptions, these aren’t tracks that I was actively listening to as I wrote Meltwater. It’s more like ‘here’s another way to access the tonal and emotional arc of the book,’ which is about fear, the future, eco-collapse, parenthood & children, death, dystopia, self-destruction, guilt & responsibility, hopelessness & (maybe) redemption.”
“Along with a dog named Lola, I wrote Monstrilio listening to music. There were songs that took me to the places I needed to be: Upstate New York, Mexico City, Brooklyn and Berlin. Others dug into feelings shouting to be explored: loneliness, chaotic giddiness, carefree monstrousness. Others jerked me away, whisked against some horror I’d just written, spitting me out at the other end, harrowed but satisfyingly alive.”