Football

Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When is the "beautiful game" at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What's right in front of fans that they never see? Football celebrates and scrutinizes the world's most popular sport-from top-tier professionals to children just learning the game. As an American who began playing football in the 1970s as it gained a foothold in the States, Mark Yakich reflects on his own experiences alongside the sport's social and political implications, its narrative and documentary depictions, and its linguistic idiosyncrasies. Illustrating how football can be at once absolutely vital and "only a game," this book will be surprising and insightful for the casual and diehard fan alike. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Mark Yakich is the Gregory F. Curtin, S.J. Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, where he has been editor of New Orleans Review since 2012. He is the author of the poetry collections Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008), and Spiritual Exercises (2019); a novel, A Meaning for Wife (2011); and a guide to reading and writing poems Poetry: A Survivor's Guide (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Football is Mark Yakich's reflection on not only the sport itself, but on his own experiences alongside it, from the ways it is portrayed, its implications, and even its language. * Buzzfeed * In the times of pandemic soccer, Mark Yakich rediscovered the importance of a harmless disease: fever pitch. His well informed and passionate book on the "beautiful game" is a survival kit. It shows that reading about football can be as intense and joyful as smelling the grass. * JUAN VILLORO is the author of half a dozen novels, including God is Round: Tackling the Giants, Villains, Triumphs, and Scandals of the World's Favorite Game, and a columnist for the newspapers Reforma and El Periodico de Catalunya. In 2004, he received the Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo (The Witness). * New Orleans is my favorite city, and pickup is my favorite thing; naturally, I loved reading about Yakich's hometown game, which serves as a starting point for thoughtful, affectionate reflections on football in all its forms. * Gwendolyn Oxenham, author of Under the Lights and in the Dark: Untold Stories of Women's Soccer and Finding the Game: Three years, Twenty-five Countries, and the Search for Pickup Soccer * In this lyric study of the sport of football, Mark Yakich invites us to look away from the bright lights of Wembley and the Maracana to the ordinary, unmaintained pitches where football is doing its most sacred work. Through stories of his own reverie during pick-up games in New Orleans during the height of the pandemic, to memorable lore of football's eccentric legends, to an etymological survey of the varied global languages of the game, Yakich reveals football's power to help people realize our interconnectedness - and to restore us. * Benjamin Gucciardi, founder of Soccer Without Borders *