Body Language: Writers on Sport (Graywolf Forum, 2) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555972624 ISBN 13: 9781555972622

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1998

Synopsis

Body Language: Writers on Sport, the second book in the Graywolf Forum Series, gathers thirteen contemporary creative writers who offer personal reflections on our public obsession: from the pool hustler to the closet baseball fan; from late-night rodeo on cable TV to tennis games on the weathered fields of Illinois; from the aging basketball player to the anxious young girl determining whether to strike out the boy who is her friend. Through these individual narratives we begin to recognize the universal themes that galvanize both sport and literature: conflict and sacrifice, ritual and passion, humiliation and heroism.

Contributors:

Gerald Early
Jonis Agee
Teri Bostian
Cecil Brown
Wayne Fields
Lorraine Kee
Phillip Lopate
James A. McPherson
Vijay Seshadri
Kris Vervaecke
Loïc Wacquant
Anthony Walton
David Foster Wallace

About this title

About the Author

Gerald Early (editor) is the author of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prize Fighting, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

From the Back Cover

Body Language: Writers on Sport, the second book in the Graywolf Forum Series, gathers thirteen contemporary creative writers who offer personal reflections on our public obsession: from the pool hustler to the closet baseball fan; from late-night rodeo on cable TV to tennis games on the weathered fields of Illinois; from the aging basketball player to the anxious young girl determining whether to strike out the boy who is her friend. Through these individual narratives we begin to recognize the universal themes that galvanize both sport and literature: conflict and sacrifice, ritual and passion, humiliation and heroism.

Gerald Early (editor) is the author of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prize Fighting, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Contributors:

Gerald Early
Jonis Agee
Teri Bostian
Cecil Brown
Wayne Fields
Lorraine Kee
Phillip Lopate
James A. McPherson
Vijay Seshadri
Kris Vervaecke
Loïc Wacquant
Anthony Walton
David Foster Wallace

Reviews

For volume two of Graywolf's Forum series, editor Early (Daughters, 1994, etc.) called for personal essays about an encounter with a sport and what significance that encounter held for the writer. But the result is far from unified thematically, ranging unpersuasively in tone from the chatty to the sleepily studious. Early notes that the collection is ``about sports as an ironical cultural expression.'' And while he finds ``something inherently pagan and inherently pointless about them,'' few of the other writers make that call. In fact, essayist Phillip Lopate admits that for him sports offers an ``abstract enthrallment'' having little to do with the final score. Lopate follows sports for its ``novelistic attributes . . . the convergence of narrative, character and situation.'' In one of the more personal pieces, newcomer Teri Bostian writes of playing catch with her father and about pitching to her nonathletic boyfriend (should she show him up, or let him hit it?), relating the fist-fight her father arranged between her and a male cousin who'd been picking on her. In an otherwise bone-dry discourse, Washington University professor of English Wayne Fields notes that basketball has never held as much fascination for ``the cultural gurus'' as have baseball and ``the armored combat of football.'' This may be because basketball is ``an approachable sport, its underdressed competitors clearly human.'' The poet Vijay Seshardi echoes Early when he refers to his youthful ``pagan worship of baseball.'' Novelist Jonis Agee contributes an ill-focused piece on rodeo bull-riding (``2,000 pissed-off pounds of rock and roll meat.''), Michigan football, female fans, and her ``new obsession'' with stock car racing. Especially when compared with the Forum series' previous volume, this one seems brief (far fewer contributors), narrow (many are writing from a Midwestern perspective), and unambitious. Perhaps the writers needed something less generalized than ``sport'' to aim at. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555972624
• ISBN 13: 9781555972622
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232
• Editor: Early Gerald