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  • Published: 20 August 2024
  • ISBN: 9781841596365
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $34.99

Music Stories



A beautiful hardback gift anthology of short stories about music by a remarkable array of literary greats, selected by Wesley Stace who is both a musician and a writer.

Variations on a musical theme by a striking range of authors, among them Flaubert, Turgenev, Proust, Nabokov, Katherine Mansfield, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Bernard MacLaverty and Maya Angelou. Wesley Stace's attractive medley embraces musical genres from Virginia Woolf's 'A String Quartet' to Langston Hughes's 'The Blues I'm Playing' and Cathi Unsworth's rock-'n'-roll 'Johnny, Remember Me'. Short stories are interspersed with interludes from longer works - E. M. Forster's Howards End, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. Here are music lessons, solos and duets, rehearsals and performances - and a whole suite of stories demonstrating that music is indeed the food of love. The perfect marriage of the musical and the literary.

  • Published: 20 August 2024
  • ISBN: 9781841596365
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $34.99

About the author

Wesley Stace

Wesley Stace is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, the international bestseller Misfortune (2005) and By George (2007). Stace is also a musician who, under the name John Wesley Harding, has released 15 albums ranging from traditional folk to pop music. The Los Angeles Times hailed his most recent pop release, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, as "Bookshop Rock like no other... expertly tweaking the lyricist's game at every turn", while the Wall Street Journal praised the album's "lyrics that dazzle without condescending."

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