Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs

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.