Lester Bangs was a phenomenal writer, and I don't even like the song Maggie May...much.Lethem's story is great, Perrotta even better. LeRoy's pretty good too. A great idea, but very hit or miss collection where nothing really stands up to the original inspiration of Bangs's 40 page story I reference above.

I was thinking this would be good cos I like a lot of the songs, but it was a pretty tired series of stories. I couldn't even get through Lester Bang's first one. The ones I liked the best were from songs I didn't know but none of them really stood out to me.

I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. Not the greatest collection of short stories, but some were great (Graffiti Monk, Heroin King, and the Springsteen one).

I don't recall what sordid bargain bin I pulled Lit Riffs out of years ago, but I do remember my expectations were abysmal. Reading this book was an adventure—I'm the kind of hipster who enjoys listening to foreign alt rock, video game soundtracks, 60s boy bands, eurobeat, and indie music; needless to say, I'm definitely not the target audience for this book. The fact that I knew exactly one of the songs referenced in this collection seemed to mitigate my disappointment; other reviewers complain...

I was really pumped about this book - music, books, what could be a better combination? But I increasingly learned as I read more that perhaps it is just impossible to write stories that are about songs. Inspired by songs, perhaps, but "inspiration" is a very loose thing, so that this doesn't really stick out to me as a collection of stories about songs but really just a collection of very random stories. (With the exception of a few, like Toure's, which are very obviously about a specific song,...

This was ordered from Amazon's sale table. Upon opening the package, I was horrified to see it was published by Mtv BOOKS. Is that an oxymoron, or what?This is a mixed bag of short stories "inspired" by popular songs. Some are good, some are VERY good, and the rest will fade from memory faster than last year's music videos.The best of the bunch took just the barest whiff of a song and turned it into good fiction.Bad things happened when the authors tried to literally translate the lyrics into st...

Several great stories, standouts thus far being "Bouncing" by Jennifer Belle, inspired by Paul Simon's "Graceland," in which a middle-aged woman from NYC attends a suburban birthday party and realizes the depths of her loneliness, and the potential to escape. Also Tom Perrotta's "Dirty Mouth," about a kid who refuses to curse, based upon Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" as well as Johnny Cash's cover of the song. Perrotta's tale was almost too short for my liking...he captures 70's/80's suburban

Some stories were great (5 stars). Others were blah (2 stars). Worth a perusal if you are up for an adventure...the stories (and songs) did not follow any particular style, so you never knew what you were getting until you dove in. Some authors tried to tell a back story for the song that inspired the piece, while others just matched a feeling that the song gave them. I almost wish that the authors did not give details about their inspiration....a couple of times it almost ruined the story. This...

I admit, I didn't read every single piece in this book. Like most anthologies, this was uneven, and the opening piece, "Maggie May" was so wonderful and strong, that I found myself comparing other pieces to it as I read. J.T. Leroy's sample was unremarkable and annoying. It's a nice conceit though, and best read with iTunes open. I really liked listening to a song and then reading the author's riff -- many were really inventive in the direction that they went. Bottom line, it made me want to wri...

This was an interesting sounding concept (short stories inspired by songs), but, for me, the end result was weak. A couple of the stories were good, but most were uninteresting. Perhaps I am just not sufficiently avant-guard but most of the stories simply seemed to try too hard to be hip. As with any short story collection, different stories will appeal to different people, so I recommend that people read with lowered demands, skipping stories that don't grab them right from the start.

I teach a couple of short stories from this collection. Not bad overall. A must for the pop music in American lit completist.

Like a lot of multi-author anthologies, a hit or miss affair. Where it suffers the most is in the conceit- stories inspired by songs - and specifically in framing it as such. Had it just been a collection without that device, inspired by songs or not, it may have felt different.As it is, because listening to music is such a personal thing, the knowledge of the specific songs inspiring the stories just opens up avenues for criticism when the author’s inspiration/interpretation doesn’t line up wit...

I wasn't particularly a big fan of short stories until I read this book. I was intrigued by the "writers cover their favorite songs" sub title. What could possibly be greater than that?My personal favorites were 'Bouncing',inspired by Paul Simon's "Graceland", which reminded me a little bit of my story 'Hound Dog' that I'm getting published this fall. It also takes a music buff to know that not only is the story's title a Paul Simon song, but that the writer was using Paul's family fictionaly. P...

A compelling idea that's, for the most part, very poorly executed. Fiction writers "cover" tunes they love by writing short stories inspired by favorite songs. The contributors who do it best here (Jonathan Lethem, Tom Perotta, Ernesto Quinonez) are often the least literal, striving instead to capture the ethos or the feel of the song they cover. The writers that are least successful seem, often, merely to be transcribing the lyrics to the song and adding a bit of narrative tissue to fill it out...

This is a good collection of stories. However, I think that the idea itself is better than the thing as a whole. Most of the songs 'covered' are among my favorites, and it was nice to see the art stretched.

I really wanted to like this book, I really did. Instead I was bored, frustrated and a little angry that someone thought this was the best that this premise had to offer. I've read a lot of short fiction anthologies in my day from either required reading for the fiction programs I was in during 2 of my stints in higher education or my feeling that they are a good way to discover new authors without having to commit to a whole novel. This was a great idea for a collection after all all writer's w...

I really wanted to like this, especially the Lester Bangs story, based on "Maggie May" - which is one of my favorite oldies songs. But I read that one and skimmed others (mostly where I knew what the inspiration song was, which wasn't very many), and I wasn't all that impressed.

It is sort of difficult to review this book overall since it is a collection of short stories, all by different authors; some of the stories i did not like that much, and i would individually would have rated about a 3, but there were also quie a few five-star stories, which is why i rated five stars overall. my favorite stories were the ones by aimee bender, lester bangs, johnathan lethem, darin strauss, elissa schappell, ernesto quinonez & amanda davis.

Pick a favorite song, and write about it. There is something very dear to my heart about this book,and though some stories stand out more than others, I appriciate a good project, and compilations with a prompt are always fun, especially when they pay tribute to music which each author clearly feels passionate about.

This book is awesome! I love music and really appreciated the concept...people writing from being inspired by songs...check it out.