The energy and drama of the sports arena is unsurpassed as inspiration for the short story, and here, in these 24 stories from some of the world’s great writers, is all of the bone-crunching action, the devious strategy, the devastating defeats, and the high-soaring victories of some of the best-loved sports of our time. The lineup includes Pulitzer Prize winners E. Annie Proulx, John Cheever, Howard Nemerov, and Paul Horgan, as well as favorites such as Joyce Carol Oates, André Dubus, W. Somerset Maugham, and Jeffrey Archer. Tales of baseball, golf, car racing, horse racing, swimming, hunting, and chess portray themes of love, loss, danger, and ambition as they express the passion for sport in all its forms. Watch an Ecuadorian bullfight turn into a bloodbath in Jack London’s “Madness of John Harned,” and learn as Simon Templar, alias “the Saint,” teaches some crooks a lesson in a few hands of poker in Leslie Charteris’s “Mug’s Game.” Both dedicated sports enthusiasts and lovers of short fiction will find Sports Best Short Stories a riveting experience.