Every decade of the 20th century and many great writers, including P. G. Wodehouse, Paul Gallico, Don Marquis, and John Updike, are represented in these great tales of golf. British duffers, amateur sleuths, pros, hustlers, plodders, cheaters, starry-eyed lovers, and crass finaglers people these stories, which range from comedy to tragedy, mystery, action, introspection, and romance. Each reveals a true love of the game and a wry understanding of golf’s frustrations, perplexities, embarrassments, and moments of pure delight.

A handful of sinister characters and dark plots pepper this collection, but for the most part, these 25 tales portray fishermen as endearing folk, good humored and quick with a yarn, eager to help a novice, and famously prone to exaggerate. The scenery includes roiling oceans, still ponds, swift rivers, and bubbling brooks, and the fish themselves range from the noble trout to salmon, tarpon, bass, dolphin, permit, flounder, grouper, weakfish, northern pike, and even a sea monster. This collection includes three classic stories: the Grimm fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife,†first published in 1815; “A Fishing Excursion,†by the mid-19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant; and Henry Van Dyke’s 1899 tale, “The Fatal Success.†The remaining stories span the 20th century and represent contemporary favorites such as Stephen King and E. Annie Proulx; early-century masters Stephen Vincent Benet and John Taintor Foote; and Philip Wylie, P. J. O'Rourke, Robert Traver, among others.

No other sport has inspired as many great writers as baseball and this exceptional anthology brings together 34 short stories about the national pastime. The stories span several decades and are written by some of America's favorite writers, including Zane Grey, James Thurber, Robert Penn Warren, T. C. Boyle, and Michael Chabon, among others. Many of the stories are about the game itself, while others use baseball as a backdrop for timeless themes, such as morality, greed, and love. Nine new stories have been added for this new edition and include "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff, in which baseball is the surprising last memory of a dying man; George Plimpton's "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch," a story about a fictional baseball player who throws a 150-mph fastball and was a notorious April Fools' Day hoax in Sports Illustrated; and Leslie Pietrzyk's "What We All Want" about a pitcher's wife's concern for her aging husband. This collection is for all baseball lovers—long after the season is over.