James Elkins’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Stories, Like Illnesses

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. James Elkins’s novel Stories, Like Illnesses is truly uniquely told and a mesmerizing treatise on memory and self. In his own words, here is James Elkins’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Stories, Like Illnesses: This is a wonderful site. I love the difference between authors who have favorite songs on deep background, giving them the feeling of their life, and authors who play particular songs in their head while they write, or the difference between authors who cite songs in their writing, and authors who hide them. My work is an outlier in all this, because it centers on music, and there’s music in the book—actual sheet music, which can be played or just seen on the…