Mark Swartz for “The Music Never Died”

Takoma Park’s Mark Swartz is the author of the novels Instant Karma (2002), H2O (2006), and Summertime Jews (2018). His new short story collection, The Music Never Died (Verse Chorus Press; illustrations by Jeb Loy Nichols), ­imagines what might have happened to Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Amy Winehouse, Lil Peep, and more, if their untimely deaths had been averted, or somehow hadn’t been the end of their lives. Booklist praised Swartz’s fiction for its “lithe satirical humor, impressive ­intellectual dimension, and sly provocation,” and these qualities are on full ­display in these at once heartfelt and borderline absurd tales.