Set on the field of play, or maybe just its memory, these stories of the sporting life range beyond the expected to include such pursuits as yoga, billiards, horse racing, cards, and boxing. Here, even iconic sports like football, basketball, and baseball get a fresh take through stories that might feature a losing coach, a woman hoopster, or a groundskeeper (rather than a star player). Whether front-and-center as a story's driving force or as a backdrop for other concerns, the skill, cunning, and aggression on display here are familiar to all of us - as players, willing or not, in all manner of contests.

Fiction. "I read the book as soon as I got back from Vegas. Then I read it again. His four leading men were Jews stumbling through late middle age, New Yorkers who despise and love each other in about equal measure. They were, as a group, stunned before their own capacities for trouble--schmendricks who fail ecstatically. Most remarkable were Camoin's sentences, which bristled with the supple dynamism of Bellow, the jazzy patter of Elkin"--Steve Almond.

The tie that binds men and women, that makes men do absurd things that they will very likely be sorry for later, is at the center of this prize-winning collection of stories.
There is, for example, Jack Segal, who is thirty-six and who owns a record store on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica and who has fallen in love--badly and madly in love--with the fourteen-yearold daughter of his friend Katzman. Segal can't think. He eats, but it doesn't taste like anything. He drives the freeways, floats above the city lights, and finds himself almost wishing that the Great Quake would come and solve everything for him.
Some of Camoin's characters are running: Diehl, from the necessity of finishing his second novel, of deciding once and for all the fate of its central character, who may be Diehl himself; the jogger-narrator of the story "Peacock Blue," from the pain of his life ("What lucky fools marathon runners are. They run for joy."); Loveman, to El Paso and a hustler's dream of paradise that turns into something else.