A Cat Playlist

A playlist of the week's best new albums, interviews with Melissa Broder & Maggie Smith, the Brooklyn Folk Festival, and more

In June I shared a cat playlist for my feline co-editor, Mr. Kibbles (AKA The Notorious KBZ), and am reposting it today.

He had been fighting some health issues the past few months, and today moved on to that great catnip garden today where treats are plentiful and glasses of water are everywhere to knock over.

Over the past nine years he would often sit next to me as I wrote or worked on Largehearted Boy, sleeping curled up on one side with my dog on the other.

In the past year, after only eight years of training, he finally became a lap cat and started sitting on our laps. There is a business book in there, somewhere.

He will be missed.

These songs are for you, KBZ:

A Playlist of the Week’s Best New Albums (9 albums, 83 songs, 6 hours and 11 minutes)

This week’s best new music includes albums from Mary Lattimore, Jolie Holland, Sufjan Stevens, A. Savage, Adeline Hotel, Mutual Benefit, Glasser, Leo Takami, and Ida Mae.

Largehearted Likes:

1. The BBC on NYC’s bodegas
   Berlin has its Spätis, Japan has its convenience stores and New York City has its beloved bodegas. According to the city's Health Department, some 7,000 bodegas dot the city, and you can hardly walk two blocks without stumbling upon one of these handy, all-in-one convenience stores that have historically been owned by members of the Hispanic community.

2. The Brooklyn Folk Festival
   November’s Brooklyn Folk Festival features three days of performances (including shows by Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra and the Fugs), workshops, and a tribute to Folkways (which celebrated its 75th anniversary this year).

   
   

Largehearted Links

1. This interview between artist Ludovic Nkoth and musician Moses Sumney
   I came to Paris and painted to dissect what it means to be a Black artist that was colonized by this country. I’m always trying to figure out, is the space changing me or is my work changing the space? I’ve always used art as a compass to find myself.

2. NYLON’s interview with Melissa Broder about her new novel
   “Grief really can feel endless. Like nature, we're really not in control as much as we would like to be, and as much as we can think we are,” Broder tells NYLON. “I see the desert as really synonymous with the experience of grief.”

3. New music from Bjork & Rosalía protesting fish farms

4. Hilary Leichter on the Partnership Between Reader and Writer
   If I tell you that a character is heartbroken, does that break your heart? No, it doesn’t. But now the heartbreak is here, lingering on the page, what to do with it? Let’s put it away for a minute, pull up a floorboard in this paragraph and hide it there.

5. Kurt Vonnegut Radio’s interview with Maggie Smith

6. “The Joys of Keeping Chickens,” a new comic from EG Shields

7. The Creative Independent’s interview with author Ling Ma
   Really, I try not to label a piece of fiction too early. I kind of just get into the idea, try to inhabit a few scenes, and rummage around in it a bit before I understand the scope of it. I think when I was writing Severance, I actually told myself it was a short story. I was trying to trick myself into thinking like, “It’s not a really big project.” You know?

8. Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s October book preview

9. Where to start with: new Nobel laureate Jon Fosse

10. Poet Safiya Sinclair interviewed about her new memoir
    Most people have an idea of Rastafari that is broad, not very nuanced. I knew when I sat down to write the book that I would be tackling some of those stereotypes and widening the view.

11. Reconsidering Lou Reed’s Berlin album on its 50th anniversary
    Reed saw Berlin as an opportunity, he’d tell the NYT in 2006, “to apply novelist’s ideas and techniques into a rock format”, developing a style that was as blunt as Chandler, as melodramatic as Tennessee Williams, as forbidden as Hubert Selby Jr.

    
    

Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts

Athena Dixon’s playlist for her memoir-in-essays The Loneliness Files

Chris Rugeley’s playlist for his novel Take Creek, For Example

Christian Kiefer’s playlist for his novel The Heart of It All

Etaf Rum’s playlist for her novel Evil Eye

Leslie Sainz’s playlist for her poetry collection Have You Been Long Enough At Table