Joseph M. Schuster (Fiction ’91): Joe’s essay “Reference Point: Fathers and Sons” is up at The Millions.  He’s also written an essay for Largehearted Boy as part of their “Book Notes” series, where authors “create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.”  Joe’s playlist complements his novel The Might Have Been (2012, Ballantine).

“The Tracks of My Tears,” Smokey Robinson and the Miracles

While my novel never mentions this Motown classic by name, this is precisely the sort of song I had in mind when I describe, in a couple of places, the high school dances Edward Everett would have gone to when he was a teenager, like the dances I went to a few years later than when he would have been in school, when couples would cling to each other under subdued lights in an overheated gymnasium, not so much dancing as turning slowly in tidy circles, feeling the weight of their love and lust for the two and a half or three minutes the song lasted, all the while the song they were dancing to was often about heartbreak...[Keep Reading]…