Baseball

by Jensen Beach (Editor), Aaron Burch (Editor)

We’ve had the idea and wanted to do some kind of “best of our online baseball issues” for years, and here is one iteration of that book. We’ve been doing it for so long (this year is our 13th!), we have too many favorites, so we made some arbitrary rules. Though we’ve been foremost devoted to fiction as a journal over the years, we found ourselves pulled toward some of the baseball creative nonfiction we’ve published, and the fiction that felt like, or played with, nonfiction. Stories about Dock Ellis’ famous LSD no-hitter, Herb Washington as the only “designated runner” in MLB history, Jim Joyce and his blown call that cost the Detroit Tigers’ Armando Galarraga a perfect game.

Genres: Sports, Baseball, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 13, 2015

About the author

Jensen Beach is the author of two story collections, most recently SWALLOWED BY THE COLD (Graywolf). He holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as an MA and BA in English from Stockholm University. He teaches in the BFA program at Johnson State College, where he is the fiction editor at Green Mountains Review. He’s also a faculty member in the MFA Program in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His writing has appeared recently in A Public Space, Cincinnati Review, Fifty-Two Stories, Ninth Letter, the Paris Review, and The New Yorker, and online at Tin House, N+1, Kenyon Review, and American Short Fiction, among others. He’s received scholarships from the Napa and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, and is one of the webeditors at Hobart. He lives in Vermont with his wife and children.

Reviews

[Michael B Tager · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like baseball more than I should. At least, I thought that until I read this. It's so gratifying that other people, smart, thoughtful people, think about baseball as much as I do. And write about it in beautiful ways. Such a great read.

[Aaron Burch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty much the best (and also most beautiful!) book on baseball ever.