This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Alone on the court, tennis players can seem uniquely vulnerable. When you watch team sports, so many moving parts can catch your eye, and the emotions of individual players are subsumed by the sheer number of stories on the field. The singles tennis player is on their own, a performer thrust into the spotlight each time the ball comes their way. Even an actor onstage usually works in concert with cast mates to pull off a successful show, but a tennis player’s fortunes are also partly in their opponent’s hands—and you can watch this drama play out on their faces. As John McPhee wrote in Levels of the Game, his classic 1969 account of a U.S. Open semifinals match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, “Confidence goes back and forth across a tennis net much like the ball itself.”
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
- Why Guillermo del Toro made Frankenstein
- The risk of financial—and moral—collapse
- The great ghosting paradox
- A novel that understands where romance is going
- Philip Pullman’s anti-escapist fantasy
The first game of the World Series is tonight, and to mark the occasion, Will Leitch recommended a list of books for The Atlantic that will make you a better sports fan. One of them is the tennis player Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open, widely considered to be “the best athletic autobiography out there.” Open is a “raw, honest” chronicle, Leitch writes, of the complicated, often bitter feelings the eight-time Grand Slam champion had about the sport that was making him millions. I immediately thought of McPhee’s very different, though equally revealing, tennis book.
Sports can ignite in spectators a mix of reactions: adrenalized excitement, deep investment, single-minded aspiration. But, as Leitch writes, “as tempting as it is to just shut your brain off, sports are always layered with meaning, and their influence extends far beyond their emotional appeal.” Looming over McPhee’s story, though unstated in the text, is the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated only months before Ashe, a Black man from Richmond, Virginia, and Graebner, a white midwesterner, met on the court. Very few Black tennis players were well known at the time, and none were nearly as good as Ashe, so he told McPhee that he’d become “a sociological phenomenon.”
Some people were blatantly racist toward Ashe; others demanded that he prioritize what they believed a prominent Black figure should do to advance Black liberation. (Another book on Leitch’s list, Harry Edwards’s The Revolt of the Black Athlete, examines the Summer Olympics that same year—and the unforgettable moment when the medal winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute on the podium.) McPhee’s book takes long breaks from his play-by-play narration of the Ashe-Graebner match to provide detailed portraits of the players and their motivations. Because they were so well matched athletically, McPhee writes, the match was “primarily a psychological struggle.”
Levels of the Game captures the timeless suspense of watching two greats play; it also reminds the reader that what happens on the court matters in the wider world. Ashe won the match and went on to become the first—and still the only—Black man to win the U.S. Open. That tournament’s biggest matches are played, every summer, in Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Seven Books That Will Make You a Better Sports Fan
By Will Leitch
What to Read
Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory
Picking a favorite book by Guillory is like picking a favorite cookie. They’re all sweetly satisfying; it just depends on what flavor you’re in the mood for. Perhaps you’re interested in a fake-dating ruse that turns into real love. Maybe you want two rivals to realize how thin the line is between hate and love. In Party of Two—the fifth novel in a series featuring the same group of friends—the protagonist, Olivia, has to navigate the spotlight that comes with dating a senator without dulling her own ambitions. What makes Guillory’s characters shine is their passion: for their work (some, including Olivia, are lawyers, as the author herself once was), for improving their communities, and for the simpler pleasures in life, which here mostly take the form of good food. Olivia and Max meet at a hotel bar, where she’s enjoying an ice-cold martini with her Caesar salad and fries. They strike up a conversation about dessert. Later, he sends a cake to ask her on a date. The whole book offers a feast for both the heart and the stomach. — Karen Ostergren
From our list: Eight romance novels for romance skeptics
Out Next Week
The Devil Is a Southpaw, by Brandon Hobson
The Great Contradiction, by Joseph J. Ellis
Unbearable, by Irin Carmon
Your Weekend Read
The Unexpected Profundity of a Movie About Bird-Watching
By Tyler Austin Harper
Birding is not the only hobby with an app problem. So many leisure pursuits now have their own gamified digital platforms: Untappd for beer enthusiasts. Strava for runners. Ravelry for knitters. Fishbrain for fishermen. Beli for foodies. Goodreads and Letterboxd for bookworms and movie buffs. The list goes on. Some have anointed these sorts of hobby apps a new, “kinder” frontier for social media: Sharing your knitting patterns is certainly more wholesome than bare-knuckle political fighting on X. But like all online social networks, these apps—many of which include leaderboards, progress bars, and achievement badges—have a corrosive side, one I’ve experienced myself as a runner. I used to log my runs, until I realized I was putting on my sneakers and getting out the door simply because I wanted to see my stats go up. I found that the apps made me more focused on narrow metrics, such as my VO2 max or total weekly miles, than the pleasure derived from the hobby itself.
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