![]() ![]() ![]() To be fair, Bissell is right, football is not a mainstay of our literary culture, a fact that can be confirmed via any number of highly un-rigorous methodologies. More generally, Bissell was repeating an orthodoxy that had apparently only become more engrained since I first heard it years earlier: that football doesn’t rise to the level of serious literary consideration, and thus what little literary fiction about the game that does exist is something of a freak. Most immediately, I had been writing a novel that drew on my experiences as a scholarship linebacker at a Division One college program, and this sentiment from an established member of the literary world-so dismissive as to be parenthetical-didn’t bode well for how my book would be received. “A hilarious literary novel about our least hilarious-and least literary-national pastime.” I would eventually read the book and learn just how brilliant it was but that night I was spooked off buying it-off even holding the thing for one second longer-by the aforementioned blurb, by Tom Bissell: ![]() One night in the summer of 2016, I was scanning the fiction shelves at Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights when I came across the hardcover of Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special, a comic, subtly experimental novel about 22 friends who convene every year to dress up in ratty football pads and reenact Lawrence Taylor’s infamous tackle of Joe Theismann. An embarrassing thing to admit to, but it’s the truth-for the past five years, I have been haunted by a blurb. ![]()
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