deadspin-book-club Page index.xml - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
I Killed My Own Book Proposal By Blogging About A Sad Flopsweaty Douchebag Clown
Sometimes people ask me why no Foodspin book exists. I have never told them why. The answer is very embarrassing!...
Weed Activity Books Are Pretty Trippy, Man
The best place to get high is outside, where you can feel the air and look for cool bugs under logs or whatever. My coworker Drew and I recently climbed a mountain and got stoned, and it was fun as hell. Sadly, not everyone lives near a park or forest or beach where you can easily and discretely smo...
<i>The Portable Veblen </i>Mixes Uneasy Marital Comedy With Psychic Squirrels, As One Does
Thorstein Veblen was a Norwegian-American writer and economist famous for decrying conspicuous consumption, getting run out of teaching jobs at Stanford and the University of Chicago in the early 1900s, and cataloging the psychological trauma of capitalism. All of which makes him a rather strange na...
The Beat Generation Starter Kit
The Beats were the Nirvana of their generation: individualistic, drug-addled, and, unfortunately, sometimes held responsible for the Nickelbacks created in their wake. Beats begat beatniks, those beret-wearing, saxophone-loving hipsters who morphed into gross ’60s hippies. And now this loose collect...
Read More Books
What was the last actual, physical book you read? If you’re struggling for an answer, please keep reading. (Note: This does not count as a book.)...
The Grateful Dead Literary-Industrial Complex Is A Long, Strange Trip All Its Own
The Grateful Dead are with us, always—in the past year, inescapably so. In our modern, retromaniacal culture, their benevolent aims and DIY apparatuses, from ticketing to merch to bootlegging, have long been a refuge for their fans. And 2015 peaked with the band’s latest, greatest, and allegedly las...
<i>The Water Knife's</i> Dystopian Future Is Terrifyingly Plausible
Any neo-noir story worth a damn is haunted by some large and invisible system whose presence is a struggle enough to comprehend, let alone try to fight against. That looming entity can vary from politicized drug wars (The Cartel and The Power Of The Dog) to ambient ’70s malaise (Inherent Vice) to pr...
The Scandinavian Crime Fiction Starter Kit
So you stayed up all night to finally read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and now you’re hooked on Scandinavian noir. Welcome to the club—after ABBA and Lego bricks, crime novels are the region’s biggest cultural export. But while Girl and its sequels brought the genre onto the global stage, Stieg...
The Road To <em>The Three-Year Swim Club</em>'s Olympic Glory Starts In A Ditch<em> </em>
Duke Kahanamoku is perhaps best known as the father of surfing, but he’s also one of the best swimmers of all time. He participated in three Olympics (it would’ve been four, if not for the wartime cancellation of the 1916 Berlin games), and served as an alternate for the 1932 U.S. water polo team. H...
<i>The Comedians </i>Is The Deep-Dive History Stand-Up Comedy Deserves
For close to a decade, Kliph Nesteroff, a former stand-up comic from Vancouver, has been exploring the underbelly of showbiz, and especially comedy, history, mainly for WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, the New Jersey freeform radio station’s online home for longform ephemera. Though the writing was clearl...
Jason Gay's <i>Little Victories </i>Is The Perfect Advice Book For People Who Never Take Any
I don’t really believe in advice. That’s not to say other people can’t teach you anything useful about how to live, but sweeping, external principles handed down from on high are useless. It’s one thing to flesh out your personal moral code with examples from other people’s lives, but swollen mantra...
How <i>A Brief History Of Seven Killings</i> Embodies The Real Jamaica
Jamaica’s biannual Calabash International Literary Festival is held in Treasure Beach, on the southwestern coast of the island. It’s the kind of stereotypically beautiful place most people—especially tourists—think of when asked to picture Jamaica. Once a year, the town setting hosts readings from w...
How To Escape From An Automobile Trunk, According To An Ex-Navy SEAL
Retired Navy SEAL Clint Emerson conducted special ops all over the world for 20 years, attached to the NSA and the now-famous SEAL Team Six. He learned some highly specialized skills along the way, and he’s now collected them in a pocket guide entitled 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide t...
How To Deliver A Devastating Elbow Strike, According To An Ex-Navy SEAL
Retired Navy SEAL Clint Emerson conducted special ops all over the world for 20 years, attached to the NSA and the now-famous SEAL Team Six. He learned some highly specialized skills along the way, and he’s now collected them into a fast-paced, pocket-guide entitled 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Opera...
What Does Ray Lewis’s Book Say About That Night In Atlanta?
A few observations about I Feel Like Going On: Life, Game, And Glory, the new Ray Lewis book wherein he addresses the night he and his friends were involved in an incident that would end in a double murder, if only briefly....
John Seabrook's Pop-Music Treatise <i>The Song Machine </i>Is Half Wrong, Half Boring
Don’t bore us, get to the chorus: John Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (Norton) is one of the most frustrating music books in memory. You will learn a lot from this book; unfortunately, a lot of what you’ll learn is inaccurate. And all too often, what’s not inaccurate is vitiated...
The Elmore Leonard Starter Kit
One of the coolest things about Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction is that he didn’t get to it until he was close to 50 years old and had been a professional writer for more than 20. His books pared away anything unnecessary with the ruthless good cheer of a steely veteran with little patience for wasti...
<i>Purity </i>Went To Communist East Germany And Found Itself
We’ll move further along in Purity in just a moment. First, I want to relay the story of what happened the first time I opened the book up after the last dispatch, in which I discussed how much truer and more knowledgeably written Jonathan Franzen’s one-paragraph description of Santa Cruz’s weather ...
Who Really Hits The Homers In <em>The Kid Who Only Hit Homers</em>? The Depressing Message Of Matt Christopher's Classic Book
Is The Kid Who Only Hit Homers a fable about the value of teamwork? Or is it a tale of using magic to get ahead, in which Babe Ruth is to Sylvester Coddmyer III as the devil is to Robert Johnson? The book, Matt Christopher's 1972 chef d'oeuvre, introduced the world to young Sylvester Coddmyer III, t...
Why Did We Like Matt Christopher So Much? Introducing The Rebooted Deadspin Book Club
Sports has never been about, well, sports—at least not in fiction. Athleticism is moral worth. A slump is karma. Winning, losing: just metaphors. If the score's the only thing that matters, you might as well watch a real game....