The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey - Hardcover

Phillips, Rowan Ricardo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374123772 ISBN 13: 9780374123772

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018

Synopsis

Winner of the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing

“The Circuit is the best sports book I've read in years, maybe ever.” ―Rich Cohen, author of The Chicago Cubs and Monsters

“As sports writing goes, The Circuit is unusual in the very best way. Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes with such fluidity, and packs the book with bursts of brilliance. This is a compulsively readable guide to one truly Homeric year of professional tennis.” ―John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars

An energetic, lyrical, genre-defying account of the 2017 tennis season.

In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet―and Paris Review sports columnist―Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it’s divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams.

Phillips charts the year from winter’s Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall’s U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle: a bucolic, separate bauble of life.

The Circuit will convince you that you don’t leave the world behind as you watch tennis―you bring it with you.

About this title

About the Author

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of seven previous books of poetry, prose, and translation. The recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award, Phillips has been a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and an NAACP Image Award, and has been long-listed for the National Book Award for Poetry. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America will be published by FSG in 2025. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374123772
• ISBN 13: 9780374123772
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256