The Roar of the Crowd

So many things are at work in our relationship with sport. Partisanship at the most visceral level, amazement at the display of the human body operating at the extremes of power, speed and strength, appreciation of grace, cunning, timing, spatial awareness, drama, forethought. Decades of rivalry are balanced by moments of sweet skill. This major new anthology of great sports writing captures the drama, the moments of speed and strength, as portrayed by great writers about many sports across the centuries. Stories and excerpts include Doris Lessing's "Through the Tunnel," Enid Bagnold's National Velvet, CLR James's A Majestic Innings, Ring Lardner's "The Champion," Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch," Garrison Keillor's "Attitude," Joyce Carol Oates's On Boxing, Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream, P.G. Wodehouse's The Heart of a Goof, and Homer's The Iliad.