books Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Why My Team Rules: The Philadelphia Eagles
Some people are haters of the Philadelphia Eagles. But many, many more people are FANS of the Philadelphia Eagles. This 2016 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the hating-ass hater’s guides to other teams you love here. Drew Magary has a new book out—have you heard?...
There’s A <i>Hike</i> Book Tour And You’re Invited
One quick note about book tours: I do not plan them. I have no say over where the good folks at Penguin decide to send me when it comes to whoring my new dose of stoner fiction live in person. Book tours tend to be expensive and therefore limited in stops, unless you happen to be some big swinging d...
David Foster Wallace Was Tennis's Best Observer
The splashiest piece of sportswriting in my lifetime might be David Foster Wallace’s 2006 profile of Roger Federer, printed in the New York Times’s short-lived Play magazine. A wrinkled copy of it lived under my old Xbox console for years, so that I knew exactly where to revisit it. At the time, the...
The Greatest Writing About The Greatest
Muhammad Ali, the greatest athlete of the 20th century, was to writers of his time what the Madonna and Child were to painters of the Renaissance. Everyone took a crack at Ali. Here at The Stacks, we’re been honored to curate Ali stories that previously weren’t available online. Our collection makes...
GRRM Reads New Old Pages, Lending Credence To Insane <i>Game Of Thrones</i> Fan Theory
Famed no-pages-haver George R.R. Martin went to Balticon last weekend, revealed Brienne of Tarth’s secret lineage, and read some pages, which, despite their fresh unveiling, are old. He’s been slowly letting out advance chapters from The Winds Of Winter, the sixth volume in his A Song Of Ice And Fir...
Someone Should Have Died In<i> Captain America: Civil War</i>
I loved Captain America: Civil War. It was fun and somehow pulled off the monumental feat of not being a bloated, nonsensical mess despite the presence of like 734 super heroes. Except one thing: no one of importance dies in Captain America: Civil War, and someone should have....
We're Sam Miller And Ben Lindbergh, The Authors Of <i>The Only Rule Is It Has To Work</i>. Let's Chat!
We’re joined in the comments by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus and Ben Lindbergh of ESPN, authors of the fantastic new book The Only Rule Is It Has To Work. (You can read an excerpt here.) The idea here is simple—the two sabermetrically-inclined writers were given control of baseball operations f...
How Two Online Baseball Writers Won An Indie-League Draft By Finding Talent And Stealing It
The following is excerpted from The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, the wonderful new book in which two sabermetrically-inclined baseball writers—Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus and Ben Lindbergh of ESPN—recount their experience running baseball operations for the Sonoma Stompers, an actual, real-lif...
I Will Ride For Gwyneth Paltrow's Cookbook
Most modern cookbooks are too complicated. With the rise of the celebrity chef and the attendant fetishization of foodie culture, everyone gets their own shot at the genre nowadays, and the results are mostly worthless. Inevitably, they attempt to replicate restaurant dishes that necessitate restaur...
I'm Jeff Passan And I Wrote The Book On Pitching Arms. Got Any Questions?
We’re joined by Yahoo baseball writer Jeff Passan, whose book, The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports, is out today. Read an excerpt here and hop in the comments to ask Jeff about the future of pitching, the grossness of Tommy John surgery, and how to fig...
<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...
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.)...
I'm Alan Sepinwall, Author of <i>The Revolution Was Televised.</i> Let's Chat!
We’re now joined by Alan Sepinwall, author of The Revolution Was Televised, a fantastic book about the origins of The Sopranos, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and other dramas that laid the ground for the current golden age of television. It’s now out in a new edition, featuring new material on how...
Five Books For Your Nerd-Ass Friend Who Still Likes Reading Like A Nerd
Useful as they are for keeping tables level, impressing visitors, and the like, books—actual, physical books—are even better as gifts. While a lousy one makes for a perfectly fine present, there’s no real reason not to get a good one. Here are some that we liked, and that we’re pretty sure you or so...
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...
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....
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...
Book Claims Louisville Provided Basketball Players And Recruits With Escorts
Pat Forde at Yahoo Sports has gotten his hands on a copy of a book written by self-described madame Katina Powell and journalist Dick Cady. The book, which has not yet been published, is called Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen, and is all about Powell’s alleged involvement in...
<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 ...
I Found <i>Purity</i>'s First Honest Paragraph, On Page 66
When last we met, Jonathan Franzen had mucked up the early pages of his novel Purity with repeated appraisals of the sex appeal of his main character, Pip. I was creeped out, but leaving room for the possibility that Franzen might be up to something that would redeem—or at least make some sense of—a...