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Music is one of my most primal and fiercely held languages. It’s how I navigate the world, echo-locating myself in place and culture through the boom-tap-booms of sound. It started when I was four. One afternoon, my father picked me up from kindergarten in his red pickup truck and drove me through the thick of Mandeville traffic. Buckled in the backseat, I was humming; I was happy; we wouldn’t leave Jamaica for another eight years. We turned right into Mid-Way Mall...

Martyr! is the debut novel from poet Kaveh Akbar. As you might expect, the language, the sentences, and the ideas are all exciting and vividly rendered with an intense musicality. This quality allows the novel to strike a fine balance: it is both a thoughtful novel of serious ideas and a propulsive intellectual romp. We’re overjoyed to feature it as one of our Picks of the Month.

The characters interact with and refer to music and musicians in myriad ways throughout, and we’re overjoyed to have, direct from the author himself, a playlist featuring all the music and musicians from the book...

At first, I thought I might go conceptual with this playlist — songs about blackouts, or losses in time and memory, or death, or erasure. (This got me thinking about the band Erasure, a band I hadn't thought about in quite some time, and I lost an hour or so dancing my way down that wormhole.) I decided against something too conceptual and considered taking a more atmospheric route: a playlist that could serve as a companion as one read the novel — that is, songs without lyrics — though ultimately...

Nobody needs a playlist that doesn’t cast a weather in the air. So the one I offer here is meant to do that: to make it rain, or snow, or shimmer, wherever it is you’re sitting. It’s inspired by my new book Do You Remember Being Born?, which follows the story of a famous 75-year-old poet, named Marian Ffarmer. She is sitting at home in her Manhattan apartment when she gets a letter from a Big Tech company. Come here to California, they say, and write a poem with our machine...

I always listen to music when I write. It helps me focus, it shuts out the noise of the world, and it often puts me in an emotive space so that I can feel deeply for, and with, characters who are going through a lot. While working, I make compilations of songs that best serve the fictive moment I’m wrestling with; some songs migrate from playlist to playlist, persistently essential to my process, and others I only want to hear for a few weeks. What follows is a list of songs I listened to when writing...

Maybe it’s the poet in me, but when it comes to music, I’m a lyrics queen. I have trouble writing when a song I know is playing, because I find myself tuning into the words of the song instead of my own. Sure, the instrumentals are important, but the lyrics are what determine whether a song hits like a banger for me.

When I was working on my debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, I had a mental moodboard of songs that captured the vibe of the book. “Hot, sad, sapphic weirdos” was a recurring theme. Lots of St. Vincent, Lucy Dacus, and Jenny Lewis...

Set at the famed Venetian orphanage and music conservatory the Ospedale della Pietà, Maddalena and the Dark is obviously a book full of music. Initially inspired by the challenge of writing a novel whose characters traded perspectives like orchestral soloists passing each other melodies, I ultimately found myself influenced not only by Antonio Vivaldi — who wrote many of his famous works for the Pietà’s all-female orchestra — but also a range of contemporary musicians tapping into the ecstasy...

Sorrow and joy, guilt and responsibility, remembrance and denial — music helps us encode and later restore so many of our feelings and experiences. While writing my memoir Wild Dances, I used this playlist to excavate memories, some of which I’d forgotten, others that I’d deliberately buried. Those memories helped me understand how my various traumas and failures, which I now see as re-directions, led me to embrace Eurovision — the glitter-slicked song contest known for its outlandish staging...