The author of everyone’s darling The Art of Fielding was interviewed on a recent segment on Talk of the Nation. You here it here:
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Posts tagged as:
baseball fiction
As long-time readers of the Bookshelf know, I feel awkward when it comes to reviewing fiction. It’s so subjective. I like dogs and you’re a cat person or I like vanilla and you can’t stand it. I’m also of a mind that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything (although that philosophy kind [...]
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Extra literary: Rutner, born this date in 1919, appeared in an even dozen games for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1947. He even had one home run. But he was immortalized by Eliot “Eight Men Out” Asinof as the inspiration for the main character in his 1955 novel about the struggles of a veteran minor leaguer, [...]
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When I play ball, most of my teammates call me Ronnie. When I was in college, they called me Kap, a take-off on my name coupled with the Kangolish-type of headgear I always wore (at camp in the Laurentian Mountains, they called me Casquette for the same reason). When I look for those literary birthday [...]
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Baseball in Folklore and Fiction, by Tristram Potter Coffin Rvive Books, 2010 Originally published as The Old Ball Game in 1971, The Mudville Heritage considers the hugely different way in which baseball was portrayed in the early to mid half of the 20th century. Coffin, emeritus professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, takes [...]
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by Peter Golenbock. The Lyons Press, 2007. When 7 came out a few years ago, many sportswriters — especially in the New York area — considered it a shande (shame). How could Golenbock — who had heretofore published only non-fiction — have besmirched the character of the late lamented Mickey Mantle with this trashy, borderline [...]
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Haven’t read this one, so not endorsing and not not endorsing, but seems like this could make for appropriate beach reading. Parenthetically, I wonder what the thought process was for the book art. At the risk of appearing risque, the cover makes me think of one of those apocryphal announcer miscues about a young couple [...]
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So my softball team participated in a playoff game last night. We lost a heart-breaker, up by three runs going into the bottom of the final frame to the team that finished in first place. Don’t get me started. Anyway, I bring this up in conjunction with Stephen King’s baseball novella. A passage from this [...]
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My review of the new Stephen King novella (plus an additional story) is up on Bookreporter.com. For your convenience, I’ve reprinted it below: There was plenty of buzz in the mystery/thriller/horror and baseball fiction communities when it was announced that Stephen King would release a novella titled BLOCKADE BILLY. Online book merchants quickly took pre-orders [...]
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The New York Times‘ sports media guy, Richard Sandomir, published this piece on Stephen King’s newest. Read the novella last week, and, frankly, I wonder if it would have received all this attention had it been written by a different (read: not as famous) author. While it’s a sufficient story, we keep waiting — knowing [...]
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, by Saul Wisnia.
, by Glenn Stout
, by Steven Travers.
by Jimmy Piersall and Al Hirshberg
, by Michael Bishop and 
by Robert Coover
