Books like Music's spell by Emily Fragos

Exploring the connection between music and the human brain.

Set in 1988, ‘The Music Shop’ follows Frank, a vinyl‑obsessed shopkeeper who meets the practical Ilse Brauchmann. Their intertwined lives explore romance, loneliness, and the struggle to preserve vinyl in a changing musical landscape.

Alex Ross’s 2007 nonfiction work surveys twentieth‑century music, blending history, criticism and rich listening narratives to reveal how composers shaped and were shaped by the era’s cultural shifts.

What the Body Told is the second book of poetry from Rafael Campo, a practicing physician, a gay Cuban American, and winner of the National Poetry Series 1993 Open Competition. Exploring the themes begun in his first book, The Other Man Was Me, Campo extends the search for identity into new realms of fantasy and physicality. He travels inwardly to the most intimate spaces of the imagination where sexuality and gender collide and where life crosses into death. Whether facing a frenetic hospital emergency room to assess a patient critically ill with AIDS, or breathing in the quiet of his mother’s closet, Campo proposes with these poems an alternative means of healing and exposes the extent to which words themselves may be the most vital working parts of our bodies. The secret truths in What the Body Told, as the title implies, are already within each of us; in these vivid and provocative poems, Rafael Campo gives them a voice. Lost in the Hospital It’s not that I don’t like the hospital. Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave. The smell of antiseptic cleansers. The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true. My friend, the one who’s dying, took me out To where the patients go to smoke, IV’s And oxygen tanks attached to them— A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared A cigaratte, which was delicious but Too brief. I held his hand; it felt Like someone’s keys. How beautiful it was, The sunlight pointing down at us, as if We were important, full of life, unbound. I wandered for a moment where his ribs Had made a space for me, and there, beside The thundering waterfall of is heart, I rubbed my eyes and thought “I’m lost.”

Anthony Storr examines how music shapes our psychology and unites mind and body, arguing that the art’s patterns bring emotional structure and heal the human psyche.

An illustrated children's edition of James Weldon Johnson’s iconic song, often called the African‑American national anthem, blending poetry, music and vibrant artwork for young readers.