It was a cover of Adele's 'Make You Feel My Love' (I know Adele's was a cover, too!) but I listened to it all the time, and that sense of generosity and wanting to give everything to another person just to make them feel beloved definitely made it into the book.

One of the songs I listened to most was a recording my singer and composer friend Faye Chiao made for me. Speaking of time travel and culture, one of my cousins got me into the Korean pop group BTS, and then I discovered pretty much all my cousins and my mom are obsessed with them, too! Their music and videos are stylish and exhilarating and surprisingly brainy: in addition to time travel and multiverses they play around with everything from the Icarus myth to neuroscience, and are packed with references to writers and thinkers like Ursula Le Guin and Nietzsche. Monae makes so many big moves musically and lyrically, but all with a sense of perspective and humor, and she is so bold about playing with ideas about time, humanity, collaboration, self determination, image-to see someone execute something so ambitious and mindblowing so flawlessly feels both free and freeing to me. It's got attitude, it's got time travel, it's filled with arresting images and ideas and plays with identities (and how we contain multitudes), the costumes are inspired, and the music moves from funk to jazz to rap, while the lyrics-agh, I don't even want to describe it, because I just want everyone to watch it and feel what I feel when I watch it. Oh my god, can I just shout in to the ether how much I love Janelle Monae? The song I listened to the most-the video I couldn't stop watching the first year I was working on The Tenth Muse was Q.U.E.E.N., which is about everything I'm interested in, and which took my breath away on every level. In her own words, here is Catherine Chung's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Tenth Muse: Chung’s novel boldly illustrates that truth and beauty can reside even amid the messiest solutions.' Chung persuasively interweaves myths and legends with the real-world stories of lesser-known women mathematicians and of WWII. 'Chung’s impressive, poignant second novel (after Forgotten Country) explores the intersections of intellectual and familial legacies. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.Ĭatherine Chung's novel The Tenth Muse is timely, poignant, and captivating. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung