Music Stories

A beautiful hardcover anthology of short stories about music by a remarkable array of literary greats, selected by someone who is both a musician and a writer

Music may be a universal language that transcends words, but that hasn't stopped our most accomplished writers from trying to capture its essence on the page, paying homage to one art form through another. The dazzling examples collected here range from Virginia Woolf's "The String Quartet" to Langston Hughes's "The Blues I'm Playing" and Donald Barthelme's "The King of Jazz," and from Ivan Turgenev's "The Song of Triumphant Love" to Katherine Mansfield's "The Singing Lesson" and Ian McEwan's "A Duet." Here are melodious scenes from E. M. Forster's Howards End and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, and stories by James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust in harmony with pieces by Vladimir Nabokov, Maya Angelou, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Philip K. Dick. Together these twenty-four musical tales make up a gorgeous symphony of literary delights. 

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.WESLEY STACE is a British singer-songwriter and author, born in Hastings, East Sussex, UK, in 1965. He released many albums under the name John Wesley Harding before switching to his birth name for more recent recordings, including 2021’s Late Style. He has recorded duets with Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, and Rosanne Cash, among others. Stace has also published four novels, including the international best seller Misfortune, and recently cowrote Mark Morris’s memoir, Out Loud. He is the creator of the monthly Cabinet of Wonders literary-musical variety show and writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Philadelphia.