Overview

Exuberant, playful, and evergreen, The Game at the End of the World revels in the grass-stained highlights of a sport without borders or boundaries. Soccer (nee football) fans will rejoice at this all-new volume of crackling essays from the author of God Is Round. Here, Juan Villoro explores the sport through the elements that make it the world's favorite pastime, from its ancient origins, near-mythic players, exhilarating matches, endemic rivalries, and the unlikely moments in which football has changed history. As a prolific writer and chronicler of World Cup games around the world, Villoro draws on a rich cultural mosaic to inspire readers, players, and fans long after the final whistle blows. With a journalist's ear and a philosopher's outlook, he has produced a collection for curious newcomers and lifelong football buffs alike.

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9781632064110

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Juan Villoro is one of my all-time people—a genuine public intellectual who wears his own importance lightly, and a truly gifted writer who manages to be hilarious, incisive, and meaningful all at once. A book by Villoro about futbol, his favorite sport, is something of an apotheosis. The Game at the End of the World is simply a delight, and a must-read for aficionados of 'the people’s game,' or for anyone who loves a damned good story, well told.” — Jon Lee Anderson “Villoro’s winning collection of soccer essays and reporting includes gratifying entries on fandom, rivalries, scandals, coaches, officials, and players both famed and obscure.” — Kirkus Reviews “This brilliant book by Juan Villoro, one of the world’s most literary aficionados of the sport of fútball/soccer, contains everything you need to know about its history, its heroes, its joys and its sorrows. It is also seems to me a magnificent handbook to the forthcoming World Cup.” — Paul Theroux, author of Dark Star Safari

“This brilliant book by Juan Villoro, one of the world’s most literary aficionados of the sport of fútball/soccer, contains everything you need to know about its history, its heroes, its joys and its sorrows. It is also seems to me a magnificent handbook to the forthcoming World Cup.” — Paul Theroux, author of Dark Star Safari

Author Information

Juan Villoro is a prize-winning Mexican author, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. His books have been translated into multiple languages. Several of his books have appeared in English, including his celebrated 2016 essay collection on soccer brought out by Restless Books, God Is Round. Villoro lives in Mexico City and has been a visiting lecturer at Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. Francisco Cantú is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. A former Fulbright fellow, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, an Art for Justice fellowship, and the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano Literature. His writing and translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review, Granta, Guernica, and VQR, as well as on This American Life. His work has also been widely anthologized, including in Best American Essays, Nepantla Familias, The Selena Reader, The Nature of Desert Nature, and Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W. G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials. A lifelong resident of the Southwest, he now lives in Tucson where he is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and a co-coordinator of Field Studies in Writing Program and DETAINED, a community archive that collects oral histories of people who have been incarcerated in for-profit immigration detention centers.

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