Award-winning lyricist, Amy S. Foster–who has written songs for musicians such as Diana Krall, Michael Buble, and Andrea Bocelli–makes an eloquent transition from songwriter to novelist in her debut novel, When Autumn Leaves. Like a well-written song, the novel evokes a powerful atmosphere. Foster’s vivid descriptions bring the charming town of Avening, a magical haven in the Pacific Northwest, to life. And the story captures our attention from the first note, when we meet the title character. Autumn is a member of the Jaen, “an ancient order of women who dedicate their lives to the service of others.” For years, she has guided the people of Avening, a town whose steady undercurrent of magic has attracted a unique citizenry. In the novel’s first chapter, Autumn learns she is being reassigned. She must leave Avening–but before doing so, she must choose her successor.

In his gem of a first story collection, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Knopf, 2009), acclaimed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro explores variations on temptations performers face: to deny their own humanity for the sake of high art, or career advancement. Music is an art of immersion. Like water–which can be experienced only through drinking it or actually getting wet–the suggestion of music ripples only in the mind. Writing (or reading) about music puts us outside the place where we experience it, in the same way that a watcher of rivers stands on the shore. Ishiguro, like a consummate outsider, lures his first-person narrators onto a deceptively quiet bank, the better to confront them with the whirlpool at the center of each story.

NYC-based writers: on Sunday, December 6 at 5 PM, gather for a free and awesome Largehearted Lit event at the Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn).
We at FWR are big fans of (and frequent linkers to) David Gutowski’s LargeheartedBoy.com, a music-lit-culture website whose Book Notes column gives established and emerging authors the chance to create [...]

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. Her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (Agate, Nov. 2008), is about twin brothers navigating life after high school in a small Gulf Coast town. Where the Line Bleeds is an Essence Book Club Selection, a 2009 Honor Award recipient from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and a nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jesmyn Ward’s essays and fiction have been published in Oxford American, A Public Space, and Bomb magazines. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and she is currently entering her second year as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

Nico Berry spoke to the author by phone as she soaked up the summer heat back home in DeLisle, Mississippi.

The Song is You, by Arthur Phillips, is a book about music and love – the grand, sweeping stuff. So you might be surprised at how controlled the writing is. Not that I was expecting the book to play a cloying tune when I opened it, like one of those oversized Hallmark cards, but I did somehow expect it to be more… well, musical. The 2006 movie Once is an example – one I thought of often while reading this – of how music can surge viscerally through a love story and vice versa, though of course a film has certain advantages in evoking song that a book does not.

Lyrics 1964-2008 (Simon & Schuster, Nov. 2008), the first collection of every word to every song Paul Simon has written in the past forty-four years, reads like a collection of short-stories, something reminiscent of Grace Paley or Richard Ford.

Brian Bartels sits down with Adam Rapp–prolific playwright, musician, director, and novelist–to talk about his latest book, Punkzilla, and the mysterious process by which the words we create are shaped by music.