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Items of interest concerning Hawthorne Books and its authors

Largehearted Boy has the playlist for Karen Karbo’s novel The Diamond Lane in Book Notes

06 Oct 2014|

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.


Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.


Karen Karbo’s The Diamond Lane: is a masterfully told satirical comic novel.


Library Journal wrote of the book:

“A deft, tragicomic social satire—of Los Angeles and the movie biz in particular and modern mores in general—noteworthy for the complexity of its characters, crisp prose, and loopy comic style.”


Stream a playlist of these songs at Spotify.


In her own words, here is Karen Karbo’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Diamond Lane:


When I sat down to begin The Diamond Lane (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991) it was called The Young and the Desperate, and was about my then-tribe, thirtysomethings from my film school graduate program who were mostly in the process of not breaking into Hollywood. My class at USC had graduated a few stars, but mostly we were struggling. We worked in offices as slaves to demanding agents. We worked on the set of movies, as assistants or in the art department (i.e. lugging around props). We snagged post-production jobs—editor, sound designer—that paid so well we could never give them up. By the time most of us hit 30, it was starting to dawn on us that try as we might, we might not make it at all. The Diamond Lane is, in many ways, the story of dreams on life support.

The playlist is culled from a few mix tapes I unearthed recently from the time. They were in heavy rotation on my Walkman during the writing of the book, and also during and immediately after its publication. It’s more historical than interpretive, and frankly pretty embarrassing. The urge to recast myself as a cool music chick listening to bootleg tapes of some proto-Riot Grrrrl garage band is powerful, but instead I’m going to stand up in the name of the ecumenical middle brow taste. Don’t judge (as no one said in 1991), and feel grateful there is not one Eagles song on the playlist.



To see Karen’s playlist, go to Largehearted Boy.