Baseball's Best Short Stories (Sporting's Best Short Stories series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1613743769 ISBN 13: 9781613743768

Publisher: Chicago Review Press, 2012

Synopsis

This expanded edition features the best-loved short stories from the 20th century as well as new tales from some of the 21st century’s most iconic names in fiction.

 

No other sport has inspired as many great writers as baseball has, and this exceptional anthology brings together 34 short stories about the nation’s favorite pastime. The stories span several decades and are written by some of America’s favorite writers, including Zane Grey, James Thurber, Robert Penn Warren, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Michael Chabon, among others. Many of the stories are about the game itself, while others use baseball as a backdrop for timeless themes, such as morality, greed, and love. Eight new stories have been added to this expanded edition and include “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff, in which baseball is the surprising last memory of a dying man; George Plimpton’s “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” a fictional story about a baseball player who throws a 150-mph fastball that was a notorious April Fools’ Day hoax in Sports Illustrated; and Leslie Pietrzyk’s “What We All Want,” about a pitcher’s wife’s concern for her aging husband. This collection is for all baseball lovers—long after the season is over.

About this title

Review:

Baseball's Best Short Stories is, quite simply, a hit machine, grinding out--one after the other, 28 selections in all--just what its title promises. Leading off with Ernest Thayer's classic poem, "Casey at the Bat," it segues directly into Frank Deford's rumination of what happened to Casey when the poetry stopped, then rounds up the usual subjects: Zane Grey's "The Rube's Waterloo," Ring Lardner's "Alibi Ike" and "My Roomy," James Thurber's "You Could Look It Up," P.G. Wodehouse's "The Pitcher and the Plutocrat," Damon Runyon's "Baseball Hattie," T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Hector Quesadilla Story," and, behind them, a bullpen of considerable depth and breadth. Staudohar steps up with a paragraph of context and biographical data for each piece, but his overall introduction is merely short and serviceable; real fans of baseball's ample literature will likely wish it went deeper in exploring the long and rich tradition that his collection engagingly sends to the plate. --Jeff Silverman

About the Author:

Paul D. Staudohar is the editor of 10 anthologies of short stories including Golf’s Best Short Stories, Hunting’s Best Short Stories, Fishing’s Best Short Stories, Football’s Best Short Stories, Murder Short & Sweet, and The Best Dog Stories.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1613743769
• ISBN 13: 9781613743768
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 440
• Editor: Staudohar Paul D.