Top 10 musical novels

Joyce Hackett's fiction and non-fiction have appeared in publications including Harpers, The Paris Review, London Magazine, Boston Review, Prospect (UK), The Independent, Salon, and the Berlin Daily Der Tagespiegel. Her first novel, Disturbance of the Inner Ear, won the 2003 the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman.

In 2003 she named a top 10 list of musical novels for the Guardian. One novel on the list:

The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

"Invisibility... gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat." Ellison takes the linear, progressive marching rhythms of Eurocentric music and turns them on their ear with a prose that, while it does not discuss much music, embodies jazz. In this story of a gifted black valedictorian who is tortured, taunted, and made invisible by the whites who must impose their myths upon him, Ellison explores, perhaps more intensely than any other prose writer, the literary possibilities of musical rhythm, time and form.

Read about the other nine musical novels on the list.

Visit Joyce Hackett's website.

The Invisible Mancomes in second on the list of the 100 best last lines from novels.

--Marshal Zeringue