Book Description
In these 25 stories about sporting contests from basketball and baseball to fishing and chess, celebrated writers from several nations spin tales of love, mystery, chicanery, luck, and perseverance. A. Conan Doyle's ace detective Sherlock Holmes solves a rugby mystery; Nobel prize winner Rudyard Kipling writes on polo; P. G. Wodehouse brings humor to golf; and Agatha Christie spins a tale about chess. The classical Russian poet and author Alexander Pushkin builds a story around another card game, faro, and from Guy de Maupassant comes a fascinating fishing yarn. American Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Ford and Paul Horgan write about hunting, while Ring Lardner and W. P. Kinsella prefer baseball, and for Ethan Canin, basketball is the inspiration. Ping-pong, bullfighting, and Mark Twain's hilarious frog-jumping contest also appear in these pages, which will amuse, energize, and astonish both dedicated sports enthusiasts and lovers of short fiction.
About the Author
Paul D. Staudohar has edited all of the books in the Sports Best Short Stories series. He is a professor of business administration at California State University at Hayward. He lives in Lafayette, California.
More Sports Best Short Stories FROM THE PUBLISHER
In these 25 stories about sporting contests from basketball and baseball to fishing and chess, celebrated writers from several nations spin tales of love, mystery, chicanery, luck, and perseverance. A. Conan Doyle's ace detective Sherlock Holmes solves a rugby mystery; Nobel prize winner Rudyard Kipling writes on polo; P. G. Wodehouse brings humor to golf; and Agatha Christie spins a tale about chess. The classical Russian poet and author Alexander Pushkin builds a story around another card game, faro, and from Guy de Maupassant comes a fascinating fishing yarn. American Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Ford and Paul Horgan write about hunting, while Ring Lardner and W. P. Kinsella prefer baseball, and for Ethan Canin, basketball is the inspiration. Ping-pong, bullfighting, and Mark Twain's hilarious frog-jumping contest also appear in these pages, which will amuse, energize, and astonish both dedicated sports enthusiasts and lovers of short fiction.
About the Author:Paul D. Staudohar has edited all of the books in the Sports Best Short Stories series. He is a professor of business administration at California State University at Hayward. He lives in Lafayette, California.
FROM THE CRITICS
VOYA - Jane Van Wiemokly
Part of the Sports Best Short Stories series, this collection contains some of the finest short stories gathered in one volume. Staudohar introduces each and gives a few facts about the author. Ranging from Alexander Pushkin's 1834 The Queen of Spades to the 1998 story Checkmate by Jeffrey Archer, every selection deals with a particular sport, sometimes in a major way, other times only peripherally. They run the gamut from card games to chess, polo, ping pong, bullfighting, hunting, and even frog jumping. The more common sports such as baseball, tennis, boxing, golf, and football are also included. Sports fans and anyone who appreciates good writing will savor stories from Agatha Christie (chess), Jack London (boxing), W. P. Kinsella (baseball), P. G. Wodehouse (golf), Arthur Conan Doyle (rugby), and Paul Horgan (hunting), among others. Mystery, humor, anguish, love, passion, deceit, violence, family dynamics—there is something of everything within these pages, all connected by sport. Mature readers are in for a treat with these engrossing stories, many of which feature some kind of end twist, marked by superb writing. VOYA Codes: 4Q 2P S A/YA (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; For the YA with a special interest in the subject; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult-marketed book recommended for Young Adults). 2004, Chicago Review Press, 336p., Ages 15 to Adult.
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