'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.

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• Kate Christensen:

  Littlenecks and cherrystones are chewy and sweet on the half shell with mignonette, served raw. But

• Kate Christensen:

  If you've got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam t

• Kate Christensen:

  My favorite way to cook a clam is in chowder. I was a New Yorker for 20 years, and I always loved t

• Kate Christensen:

  I left New York in 2009 when I fell in love with someone who had a farmhouse in New Hampshire... Po

• Kate Christensen:

  I procrastinate all morning. That's when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what'

• Kate Christensen:

  It's really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.

• Kate Christensen:

  Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle.

• Kate Christensen:

  I've always had rock star envy. Unfortunately, writing is a pedestrian, tame occupation done while

• Kate Christensen:

  Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female.

• Kate Christensen:

  Iggy Pop has a voice that's somehow simultaneously self-mocking, wild, precise, amused, righteous,