“I don’t listen to music when I write, which is a ridiculous thing to say. Who doesn’t have something that triggers them like a song? “
“…much like the collection—which is set in Turkey, the crossroads of the East and the West—the playlist presents a rich mixture of cross-cultural influences.”
“Music serves as a soundtrack to the scenes I imagine in my mind.”
“If Liquid, Fragile, Perishable were a play, it would call for an ensemble cast of ten and a few important but smaller roles.”
“The book is an all-in-one-night adventure through a Chicago underworld populated by creatures of Slavic folklore that touches on complicity, inherited burdens, and a dash of Polish diaspora. “
“My first novel, How It Works Out, tells the story of Myriam and Allison, a queer couple whose relationship plays out through a series of surreal hypotheticals.”
“I’m very literal about my playlists.”
“.A child born of the cassette generation, mixtapes and the music I’ve laid on them are just as formative to my identity as anything else. I think they were my first essayistic practice, stitching a story through them, hoping to invoke a feeling across them all.”
“I have organized the list into songs that represent the book’s various characters. Some songs make actual cameos in the novel, while others capture something essential about a character.”
“…it’s about embracing and celebrating all of this as life, all of this as part of our collectively gorgeous, terribly difficult journey on this precarious planet—these songs capture that same soaring bittersweetness.”