The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey

The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey

<p><b>Winner of the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing</b><br><b><i></i></b><br><b><i>“The Circuit</i> is the best sports book I've read in years, maybe ever.” ―Rich Cohen, author of <i>The Chicago Cubs</i> and <i>Monsters</i> </b><br><b></b><br><b>“As sports writing goes, <i>The Circuit </i>is unusual in the very best way. Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes with such fluidity, and packs the book with bursts of brilliance. This is a compulsively readable guide to one truly Homeric year of professional tennis.” ―John Green, author of <i>The Fault in Our Stars</i></b><br><b></b><br><b>An energetic, lyrical, genre-defying account of the 2017 tennis season.</b></p><p>In <i>The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey</i>, the award-winning poet―and <i>Paris Review</i> sports columnist―Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it’s divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams. </p><p> Phillips charts the year from winter’s Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall’s U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle: a bucolic, separate bauble of life. <br><i></i><br><i>The Circuit</i> will convince you that you don’t leave the world behind as you watch tennis―you bring it with you.</p>