Literary Hub cites The Might Have Been as a notable contemporary baseball book.
The Might Have Been cited in the Buffalo (New York) News list of “staff reading selections”: “a great baseball book.”
“The Might Have Been is a clear-eyed, often sharply funny tale full of tragic aspirants, villains, washed-up buffoons, and men struggling not to become washed-up buffoons—each of them at once idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable.”
-from “Joseph M. Schuster and the Space Between” by Tricia Khleif, Bloom, June 24, 2013
Book Riot names The Might Have Been as one of the “Top Five Overlooked Books of 2012”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch names The Might Have Been one of its favorite books of the year for 2012.
The Might Have Been is a finalist for the CASEY Award for the “best baseball book of 2012.”
The Riverfront Times names The Might Have Been the “Best Book by a Local Author” in its annual “Best of St. Louis” issue, saying, in part, “With precise, carefully chosen details and a sly sense of humor, Schuster . . . offers up a close examination of Edward Everett’s life . . . and his many, many regrets, chief among them the son he may have fathered during a fleeting romance in the summer of ’76. In this portrait of a man who manages to hold onto his faith in baseball despite its many disappointments, Schuster has hit a dinger.”
Interview with Mark Dewitt on Cover to Cover, June 27, 2012
Two-thousand words on the music behind The Might Have Been: Book Notes on Largehearted Boy, April 18, 2012
“It’s a lovely, poignant, heartbreaker of a baseball novel, as good as last year’s hyped The Art of Fielding. . .”
–from a profile in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 15, 2012, by book editor Jane Henderson.
Book Riot names The Might Have Been one of the top six baseball novels, along with Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Thomas Dyja’s Play for a Kingdom, Phillip Roth’s The Great American Novel, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and David James Duncan’s The Brothers K.
CNN’s Ahead of the Curve: Weekly pop culture calendar for March 18 mentions The Might Have Been as a book “you shouldn’t miss this week.”
“If I were going to sum up my advice [for writers] in one sentence, it would be, ‘Take more time with your work than you think you need to take.’ ”
-interview with Joseph M. Schuster on The Debutante Ball
“Joe Schuster didn’t intend to start writing a novel that summer day in 2001, especially not one that would end up occupying significant portions of his life for the next nine years. All he wanted was an excuse to miss the afternoon session of the writing conference he was attending. The past few days had been filled with too many writers, too much talk about writing. It felt like overload.
So he retreated to his room and, sitting there in the quiet, a sentence occurred to him: ‘The summer everything came together for him, he was 24.’ ”
– From a profile in The Riverfront Times
“I thought there was something sad and tragic about that inability to let go when the game is telling you that you need to let go.”
–St. Louis Magazine interview with Joseph M. Schuster.
Reader’s Digest has named The Might Have Been as one of its “editor’s recommend” picks. The magazine also features the book in its spread of “mini book excerpts in the March 2012 issue.
“Some people—too many people, I feel—come to regret the lives they have, although they made the decisions that gave them that life. To regret the life you gave yourself seems like another sad fact.”
– From an interview on Drunk Writer Talk
Joseph M. Schuster 