Sunday, August 21, 2016

Five top works of fiction for musicians

At B&N Reads Jenny Shank tagged five fabulous works of fiction for musicians, including:
Music for Wartime, by Rebecca Makkai

Makkai’s brilliant story collection is filled with tales of people for whom music is lifeblood. Sometimes Makkai takes this in a playful direction—in “Couple of Lovers on a Red Background,” a divorced woman who yearns to become a mother discovers that Johann Bach has appeared in her apartment. She sets out to seduce the father of 22, in the hopes of producing a prodigy. In other stories, music is a matter of life and death, as in “The Worst You’ll Ever Feel,” in which the son of a Romanian musician can intuit the story a musician is expressing through his music, and he learns from a Jewish violinist’s song about his suffering in Romania during World War II.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue