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From The Desk Of Christopher O’Riley: Megan Abbott’s “The End Of Everything”

Perhaps best known for the NPR series From The Top, musician Christopher O’Riley is far more in-tune with music than most of the world. Not only does he host and mentor young musicians, O’Riley also transcribes and arranges songs by Radiohead, Arcade Fire and more for the piano and, more recently, the cello. O’Riley has just released a new album with cellist Matt Haimovitz, Shuffle.Play.Listen. (Oxingale), a tribute to contemporary composers and some of the most modern musicians. Owing to his virtuosic abilities and interesting outlook, we invited O’Riley to guest edit magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

O’Riley: Another of my daisy-chain of recommended writers, Megan Abbott appeared as an epigrammatically quoted chapter head in a Ken Bruen noir novel. Who knew my curiosity would lead me to the richness of her indelible noir contributions, Queenpin, Die A Little, Bury Me Deep and my favourite L.A. noir of all time, The Song Is You? And how would one have predicted, save for the intuitive and exhaustive empathy of her writing, here infusing the mind of her teen protagonist in a novel of, if not for young adults, such a quintessence of horror in lost innocence, of a maturity of such knocks instead of nuturings? A brilliant, beautiful book. Her next, Dare Me, comes out this summer. Thankfully, one can keep up with Megan’s musings at the Abbott/Gran Medicine Show.

Video after the jump.