Many thanks to David Gutowski at Largehearted Boy for publishing my Forest of Fortune playlist. Here’s the introduction:

My novel is informed by the five and-a-half years I spent working at an Indian casino. One of the characters, Alice, is a Native American woman who is haunted by trains. The inspiration for this character comes from a period in my life in the 1990s when I went to grad school in a mountain town on the edge of the Navajo reservation.

The songs are from a surprisingly un-punk roster of artists that includes Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Cypress Hill, PJ Harvey and Santana, whom I loathe. Read the rest of the essay.