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 humour 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, energise, and astonish both dedicated sports enthusiasts and lovers of short fiction.

Presents a collection of short stories about sports from such authors as E. Annie Proulx, P.G. Wodehouse, Ellery Queen, Jeffrey Archer, and Joyce Carol Oates.

This anthology brings together 28 exceptional short stories about the great game of baseball. Written over several decades by some of America's famous writers, many of the stories are about the game itself; others use baseball as a backdrop for timeless themes, such as morality, greed, and love. All of them pay tribute to a game that has merged with America's national identity.

This collection of 24 short stories covers every aspect of golf from the player to the caddie to the clubhouse, capturing with passion the very essence of golf. The authors include John Updike, P.G. Wodehouse, E.C. Bentley and Don Marquis.

These six powerful short stories chronicle bits of the lives of characters, major and minor, who have walked the rugged terrain of Chris Crutcher's earlier works. They also introduce some new and unforgettable personalities who may well be heard from again in future books. As with all Crutcher's work, these are stories about athletes, and yet they are not sport stories. They are tales of love and death, bigotry and heroism, of real people doing their best even when that best isn't very good. Crutcher's straightforward style and total honesty have earned him an admiring audience and made readers of many nonreaders.

A collection of 150 unusual occurrences in a dozen different sports.

This anthology of short, autobiographical stories has kids’ book authors telling tales of their own real-life athletic incidents. Some are funny, some are serious, and some put their own twist on the whole “sports” concept. Eight stories from both “boys” and “girls” include tales of dodgeball, wrestling, track, softball, and ballet. Kids will relate to the struggling non-jocks as well as the athletes who take the trophy home.

Dan Gordon, who is widely regarded as one of the three best football handicappers in the world, shares his inside tips and strategies on making big money betting on NFL football. Much of the information here is available nowhere else. More than 40 chapters cover basic, advanced and expert concepts that will give readers the most powerful winning information available anywhere. Readers learn how to set up betting models and use power ratings and how to separate performance from perception. Gordon shows how to beat the point spreads and money lines, and how to bet underdogs, propositions, teasers, parlays, futures, and much, much more.

34 sports stories that may be beyond belief but have been forgotten.

What will the European retail banking landscape look like in 2010? The book describes the current picture, trends and drivers, analyses the industry along its value chain and searches for key success factors in each step. Additionally, the authors search for new paradigms by looking at benchmarks both within and outside the banking industry.