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.

In this lively anthology of 21 stories and one classic poem about football, fathers and sons tackle their issues, coaches and quarterbacks collide, and ordinary heroes emerge from the blitz.

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.

In this powerful collection, classics including Guy de Maupassant's 'Love' and Ernest Hemingway's 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber' join contemporary offerings such as Wallace Stegner's 'The Blue-Winged Teal', 'On the Antler' by E Annie Proulx, and David Quammen's 'Walking Out'. From duck, goose, bear, and grouse hunting to stiffer contests for deer, elk, moose, bear, and big African game -- in one case, even a manhunt -- all kinds of hunting and all possible outcomes, from the comic to the heartwarming, disastrous, or bizarre, are explored. Against the backdrop of ocean, frozen swamp, forest, or jungle, we see the deep bonds between father and son, huntsman and dog, man and nature being forged or chattered as the line between sport and survival blurs, and the hunter risks becoming prey to weather, to circumstance, or to human and animal foes.

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.

Winner of the Phillip H. McMath Award for prose In Mannequin and Wife, the debut story collection from Jen Fawkes, sharp and imaginative tales trip seamlessly across borderlands, navigating comedy and tragedy, psychological and magical realism, the mundane and the marvelous. Readers of these adventurous fictions will encounter a flock of stenographers, the strongest woman alive, a taxidermist with anger issues, an Elephant Girl, a fairy on her lunch break, and a married couple who live with a department store mannequin. Elsewhere, an American actor impersonates a code-breaking Britisher during World War II. A mother awaiting her son’s return discovers his personal ad soliciting the services of a cannibal (and fears the worst). A criminal mastermind’s protégé plots the destruction of Mount Rushmore from within an extinct volcano. A man buys a drive-in theater and transforms it into a carnival sideshow. And an attorney puzzles over how to leave someone his deceased client’s heart. Fawkes’s award-winning stories examine the vagaries of human relationships—mother and child, husband and wife, mentor and protégé—to tease out the startling complications that arise from our entanglements with those we loathe and those we love.

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.