“What is cricket?” Does it represent the past or the future of India? The first time the question appears in Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day, Mumbai scout Tommy ...
Sports
Editors: Frank Andre Guridy & Bécquer Seguín
Soccer for Intellectuals
Baseball has Roger Angell. Boxing has A. J. Liebling. Yet soccer, puzzlingly, has no writer of such caliber, no one who has managed to find in the sport a comparably inexhaustible source of literary ...
Athlete Activists
In fall 2016, Colin Kaepernick shook the sports world. A quarterback on the San Francisco 49ers football team, Kaepernick kneeled in silence during the national anthem …
The Book That Made Me: Gay
A professor of English and gender studies reveals how one’s identity can be transformed from the most unexpected sources—in this case, sports memoir …
Rio, Capital of Disaster Capitalism
The Olympic rings loom large over Rio de Janeiro. Seven years after the city won its bid to host the games, the impending two-week extravaganza has swept changes across the Marvelous City, as Rio is ...
The Bonds of the Sea
What do war journalism and surfing have in common? On the face of it, not much: surfing is a frivolous pastime and war reporting a humanitarian endeavor to shine a light on violent conflict in ways ...
Caravaggio’s Hair
Human hair, as Álvaro Enrigue points out in Sudden Death, is the only part of the human body that does not rot. It accordingly plays a starring role in the novel, which is as interested in the ...
Master of the Flying Nothing
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on ...
Enrigue’s Backspin
Four-fifths of the way through Álvaro Enrigue’s Muerte súbita (Sudden Death), the narrator admits that he doesn’t know what the book is about. It’s not about the birth of tennis as a popular sport ...
Hopelessly Devoted: Why We Watch Sports
My father called me the other day to ask if I was in a good mood. The Mets were in first place, having triumphed in their season opener. These days Mets fan cherish even the briefest of moments on ...
Another Fistfight in Heaven
By the second page of Sherman Alexie’s newest collection of short stories, Blasphemy, it’s pretty clear he isn’t going to pull any punches. As the narrator of “Cry Cry Cry” observes with reference to ...