Over the course of the last century, American fiction writers and poets have used sports figures and sporting events in order to make significant points on themes of identity as they are connected to gender, race, class, and nationality. The contributors to this volume examine American literature that uses sports as a trope to explore or disturb core values of this country. They explore individual works in order to uncover the rich connections between those works' use of sports and issues of importance to American culture from approximately 1920 to the end of the twentieth century. Focusing...

Still Time is a collection of twenty-five short and shorter stories exploring tensions that arise in a variety of contemporary relationships: a young boy must deal with the wrath of his out-of-work father; a woman runs into a man twenty years after an awkward sexual encounter; a wife, unable to conceive, imagines her own murder, as well as the reaction of her emotionally distant husband; a soon-to-be tenured English professor tries to come to terms with her husband's shocking return to the religion of his youth; an assembly line worker, married for thirty years, discovers the surprising...