Best Canadian Sports Writing

Taking readers into the realm of the sublime and bizarre, and rarely stepping into the mainstream, this collection includes many examples of excellent sports writing but also of a paradigm shift “in which subjectivity, persona, and emotion have supplanted the long-hallowed authority of journalistic expertise.” Sampling heavily from online publications, editors Fowles (Baseball Life Advice) and Malla (Fugue States) demonstrate that Canadian sport is bigger than just hockey and baseball, which get just four stories each. Basketball rules the day, with six of the 38 entries, but the oddities vying for readers’ attention are what stick in the mind: the saga of ski ballet, nearly freezing to death while competitive bass fishing, street racing in Toronto. Alongside stories that scream Canada—a Filipino basketball league in the Yukon, or hockey parents behaving badly—there are trips to Dagestan on the Caspian Sea, home to mixed martial arts fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov, and to Brooklyn, for female boxer Kristina Naplatarski. It’s refreshing to see works by female writers and formerly taboo topics such as sexual assault and minority representation. The stories range from column length to epic, and they cover disparate sports, but all have great writing that holds the book together. Agents: (for Fowles) Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic; (for Malla) Martha Webb, McDermid Agency. (Sept.)