Back To School Soon...

plus new albums from Emily Hines & Laura Groves; interviews with Ethel Cain & Michael Clune; live music from Deep Sea Diver; & much more

School starts for me next week, a couple of weeks of professional development before the students arrive. Like most of the kids, I’ll be a bit heartbroken that my summer is ending.

This summer has been filled with good friends and good music, as well as many good books. Our summer trip to Scandinavia was refreshingly cool and exciting, who would think that a city that peaked in the 1400s (Visby) could be so interesting? Or that an Airbnb in the same building as Copenhagen’s oldest bakery and down the street from a charming beer bar would ruin my diet?

The best times were just relaxing or doing things with my partner: planting hostas and windowboxes in the backyard or reading or watching television inside when the temperatures in Brooklyn neared 100. A house (and yard) as oasis is a wonderful thing.

I’ll be sad to say goodbye to this summer, but excited to start my third year of teaching. Getting to know my students and having the opportunity to help them achieve their greatness is something I am thankful for every day in the classroom.

A couple of years ago I shared a back-to-school playlist, and have been streaming it to get back into the school year mindset:

What is the highlight of your summer?

A Playlist of the Week’s Best New Music (20 albums, 188 songs, 11 hours, and 2 minutes)

This week’s new music includes releases by Emily Hines, Robert Deeble (link to album at Bandcamp), Wisp, Laura Groves, Welcome Strawberry, Rosali, Mal Devisa, The New Eves, Fortitude Valley, Haru Nemuri, Everything Else, Freezing Cold, Return to Dust, Demahjiae, Anthony Family, Sex Week, The Armed, QWAM, Spafford Campbell, and Caimin Gilmore.

Largehearted Book & Music Links:

1. John Darnielle remembered Ozzy Osbourne
   The timbre of his voice—instantly recognizable; once heard, never thereafter mistaken for anybody else’s—allowed those who experienced it to feel addressed; recognized; seen. This set him apart from his peers in hard rock, vocalists of greater force and technical mastery. You cannot, on your best day, imagine being Robert Plant, but Osbourne is like Jerry Garcia. When he’s singing, he might even be you, given different circumstance. He makes the moment feel generally available.

   

2. Public Books held a roundtable discussion about J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace on its 25th anniversary

3. Deep Sea Diver visited KEXP for an in-studio performance and interview

4. Ed Park talked short story writing with LitHub
   Seeing stories to their end is something that Park does not for publishing’s sake—“that feels a little out of my hands”—but for completion and, often, performance. He wrote some of this collection for public readings around New York, which he’s long taken part in as an editor and a teacher. “In my mind, those invitations let me try something new,” Park says. “It’s like a vacation from working on a novel. And for those, I usually write with an audience in mind. My title, An Oral History of Atlantis, reflects that a lot of these were read aloud.”

   

5. The New York Times interviewed Ethel Cain
   I don’t care what music people want from me. But it’s still like, this is what funds my life. I do not want to have to go back to working a day job like I did for so many years to fund the music. So I do have to find the compromise of, we put out an album, I tour it, I make a pop song or two, and I enjoy that. But then I will make an hour-and-a-half-long drone album.

   

   

6. Michael Clune discussed the connections between writing his memoir, White Out, and writing his debut novel, Pan, with Interview magazine
   I think there’s a lot of different connections, just because of how I write. My writing’s sort of animated by a faith that if you look into important experiences deeply enough, they’ll reveal really surprising things. So when I’m talking about heroin and addiction in White Out, or I’m talking about panic and anxiety in Pan, I sort of see the experience as a door. And we have names for those doors, like addiction or panic or anxiety. But as writing allows me to open that door, it reveals really unsurprising facts between surprising places. For example, between addiction and the divine, or between panic and the occult. I’m really interested in allowing those kinds of connections to emerge.

   

7. Marissa Nadler discussed essential tracks from her discography with The Quietus

8. The 2025 Booker Prize longlist has been announced

9. Bandcamp Daily recommended albums by artists not named Fugazi released by Dischord Records.

   

10. Arundhati Roy talked to Publishers Weekly about her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me
    “There’s not much about myself as a private person out there,” Roy says. “Fundamentally, the challenge was that I didn’t want to be selling some nice version of myself in a book. That was very important to me.”

11. Stream a new song by the Antlers

Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts:

Christopher J. Yates’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Rabbit Club

Joanna Howard’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Porthole

Linda Dahl’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Tiny Vices

Sonya Huber’s Book Notes music playlist for her anthology Nothing Compares to You

Vincent Adejumo’s Book Notes music playlist for his book The Return of Black Nationalism and the Death of White Supremacy