Hoop

Brian Doyle himself explains it best: ""A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin's golf stories? Where are the annual anthologies of terrific basketball essays? How can a game full of such wit and creativity and magic not spark more great books?""""Why don't you write one?' said my dad, who is great at cutting politely to the chase.""And so he has. In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.

Anyone who has shot baskets at a playground court will relate to Hoop. As a former college basketball player, who is married to a former college basketball player, and whose two sons play college basketball, and as a writer and reader who has read countless books about basketball, I can tell you that this is one of the best books I've read about the game and its culture.--Todd F. Davis "editor of Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball", I am not the ideal reader for this book but I became the ideal reader. I didn't think I could read essays about basketball because I do not play the game. I read it to hear Brian Doyle's voice, which is one of the most distinctive voices in nonfiction. I read it to learn, against my will, what a hook shot is, how to box someone out, and what a pick is. I read this book with the hope and the recognition that the big stories exist in the small stories and that paying attention to and remembering the details is what amounts to the big stuff. As a writing lesson and a life lesson, Hoop completes a generous pass.--Nicole Walker "coeditor of Bending the Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction"

Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of twenty books of essays, fiction, poems, and nonfiction, including Chicago, Martin Marten, The Plover, Children and Other Wild Animals, Mink River, and The Wet Engine. His other writings have appeared in Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, the New York Times, Harper’s, the American Scholar, and the Atlantic.John Griswold is an assistant professor in the MFA program at McNeese State University and the editor of the McNeese Review. He is the author of the novel A Democracy of Ghosts and of the nonfiction narrative Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana.