Full Court

A literary anthology of basketball



If you love basketball and you love reading, FULL COURT will be the ultimate pleasure. A collection of all the best fiction and poetry on the sport of basketball, it glorifies the wild grace and rhythm of the game, and the place basketball has in our hearts.


Great contemporary writers, from John Updike to Bobbie Ann Mason to John Edgar Wideman, and dozens of others, all have shown a soft spot for hoops in their writing. And those stories and poems are gathered here in a slam-dunk of a book. All who love the fluid, high-paced game will find themselves strangely moved by its beauty in print. Basketball is a game of a thousand frozen moments, tensions, eternities, struggles; and each of these is rendered with artistic majesty on every page.


One boy learns the game from his father. Another gets a lesson from his mother, who can dunk like no one else. A rookie in the pros gets battered by his new teammates before winning their respect. A high school girl finds strength and and glimmers of her sexuality through the game. A young man plays a game against the devil himself. One man sees just how good extraterrestrials are at the game, much to his abiding awe. One man tells the story of a blind player who could still sink a jumper.


Basketball is a far-reaching metaphor, embodying life, love, mortality, and all our hopes and aspirations. These poems and stories contain the game in so many permutations that no one who ever played will fail to see their game herein. FULL COURT is a big, crowded, animated, artful game of basketball, one that never ends.


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PRAISE FOR FULL COURT


"From John Edgar Wideman to Bobbie Ann Mason to Sherman Alexie, Trudell presents the best in recent basketball fiction and poetry." —L. A. Weekly


"Full Court allows you to contemplate the beauty of this very American game without the glow of the television and the noise of the arena. Basketball is a worthy subject for serious literature." —Orlando Sentinel


"A welcome addition to the sports fiction genre." —Los Angeles Times


"This ambitious collection of poems and stories shows that hoops, too, can be a writerly muse.... The best pieces chosen by Trudell use the game in daring and revealing ways." —Publishers Weekly


"It's fairly amazing the number of poets and fiction writers drawn to the sport, including Sherman Alexie, Edward Hirsch, Bobbie Ann Mason, William Matthews, Leonard Michaels, John Sayles, and John Edgar Wideman." —Memphis Commercial Appeal


"Dennis Trudell has secured some of the finest and most illuminating examples of basketball short fiction and poetry produced over the last twenty-five years into one splendid book.... The works under consideration here are most compelling examples of the power of basketball to command the imagination, to be what every sport needs to survive the momentary electricity of competition and sweaty hustle: an occasion to observe the human character under extreme intensity, an occasion to learn about ourselves, an occasion to exercise the vast capacity of the human imagination to invent." —Aethlon



"The stories are a potpourri of small triumphs and heartbreaking defeats, extravagant matches and fantastic premises: A blind player is still able to hit jump shots, a player takes on the devil, and a slow-witted `natural' is bested in an intramural game that haunts him the rest of his life. Tragedy and victory mix like spilled blood on the court; personal bests attain mythic dimensions." —Isthmus


"Perhaps what Full Court ultimately teaches is a two pointer: that the game is most satisfying when played in the arena of the imagination, and that good sports writing is always simply good writing, period."

—Cleveland Plain Dealer


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FEATURING:

Sherman Alexie

Jonathan Baumbach

Edward Hirsch

Yusef Komunyakaa

Bobbie Ann Mason

William Matthews

Leonard Michaels

Willie Morris

John Sayles

Quincy Troupe

John Updike

Theodore Weesner

John Edgar Wideman

and many more