The Music Never Died: Tales from the Flipside

Sixteen irreverent and inventive fictions that riff on rock and rap mythology to envisage alternate paths for music legends who died young.

What if Biggie Smalls had survived the assassin’s bullets and reinvented hip—hop with the help of an avant—garde luminary? If Amy Winehouse had shaken off her demons and channeled her inner Barbra Streisand into a new life on a tropical island? If Jeff Buckley had been pulled alive from the Mississippi by a devilish hand and become a pioneer of Southern black metal?

With accompanying illustrations by Jeb Loy Nichols, Mark Swartz’s stories imagine what might have happened to these stars and more—including Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Lhasa de Sela, Lil Peep, and Jim Morrison—if their untimely deaths had been averted, or somehow had not been the end of their lives. Booklist praised Mark 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.