We are excited to reveal the cover for Emily Nemens’ forthcoming book, The Cactus League, out February 4, 2020! It is an explosive, character-driven odyssey through the world of baseball written by the editor of The Paris Review.
“I started writing stories about baseball in 2011, but the genesis of my first novel, The Cactus League, goes back to the mid-nineties, when my dad and I first went to Major League Baseball’s spring training in Arizona. We didn’t go every year, but we returned to the Cactus League often enough that as I grew up I got a sense of the desert and the weird and wonderful culture that had developed around spring training baseball. There are so many stories unfolding across Phoenix every spring—on the diamond, but also in the front office, in the stands, even in the parking lots—that I knew I had the stuff of a novel. The hard part, and the joy, of writing was imagining up these particular athletes, this team (your Los Angeles Lions), and their fans. I wanted to explore what happens to this community across one fraught spring—and not just on the field, among players, but also after the game, once the moon had risen over them all.”
Emily Nemens is the editor of The Paris Review. She was previously the coeditor of The Southern Review. Her work has been published in Esquire, n+1, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, and elsewhere.
Cover design by Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Art Director Alex Merto.
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