Long Players
A Love Story in Eighteen Songs
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
ARTFORUM Ten Best Books of 2018
“Sad, joyous, funny, heart-cracking: I can’t remember the last time I read a book that rendered such raw feeling with such intricate intelligence.” —Gayle Salamon, ARTFORUM
“A beautiful book. Deeply personal and yet entirely universal. . . A travelogue through the landscape of a broken heart.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat Pray Love
A passionate, heartfelt story about the many ways we fall in love: with books, bands and records, friends and lovers, and the families we make.
Have you ever fallen in love—exalting, wracking, hilarious love—with a song? Long Players is a book about that everyday kind of besottedness—and, also, about those other, more entangling sorts of love that songs can propel us into. We follow Peter Coviello through his happy marriage, his blindsiding divorce, and his fumbling post marital forays into sex and romance.
Above all we travel with him as he calibrates, mix by mix and song by song, his place in the lives of two little girls, his suddenly ex-stepdaughters. In his grief, he considers what keeps us alive (sex, talk, dancing) and the limitless grace of pop songs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Music-obsessed academic Coviello (Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America) writes episodically about music and his failing marriage while living in a small college town in Maine. The book's structure and the author's love of 1990s indie bands can't help evoking Rob Sheffield's Love Is a Mixtape, though Coviello's is a more sprawling, tempestuous affair, hurtling through the giddy peaks and darkened valleys of the bar-crawling years following his divorce. Coviello has a lot to say about music, ranging from the pocket epiphanies that occur to him while listening to the Wedding Present's song "Dalliance" while wandering Madrid in a heartbroken trance (the band's music is for those who "like arguments made mostly of enormous distorted sound") to the regenerative joys of listening to sublimely smooth pop like Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" with one of his ex-stepdaughters. But this is a book also about love, and Coviello flings himself into a search for some kind of reassurance that, even without it, his life is not over. The chronicle of overeager romances on his postdivorce travels have all the shimmering choruses and gloomy in-between patches of the songs he listens to. It's an exhausting trip to take, but it's also memorably passionate.
