The Strikeout Artist by Joseph Bates

It’s 1912, and the New York Knights-Errant are off to their worst start in franchise history: 61 straight losses, part of a grueling 120-game road season, with no home ballpark to return to. The team’s terrible conditions are the fault of their mysterious new owner, whose bizarre decision-making takes a toll on them from the start—condemning the Knights-Errant to a weary season crisscrossing the country in a haunted old steamtrain; communicating through cryptic cablegrams which offer no practical guidance for winning (“The game as metaphor / Abner Doubleday’s lie”); and perhaps worst of all, drafting into the rotation a 28-year-old rookie righthander from Bohemia by the name of Franz Kafka, who claims not to be a ballplayer but a writer of literature and who has, by his own admission, never held a baseball in his life.

THE STRIKEOUT ARTIST is a novel about art disguised as a novel about baseball, and vice versa. It’s about unsung losers, forgotten steampunk sports leagues, and most of all, about the spirit that leads us in the pursuit of our elusive dreams, and which keeps us forever stepping out onto the field of play, even when the game’s already been lost.

There’s no other novel like Joseph Bates’s The Strikeout Artist, a how-did-he-think-of-this miracle starring the great Czech writer Franz Kafka as a professional baseball pitcher in early twentieth century America. This book is a masterpiece of surrealism, but it’s also a bighearted, hilarious, eagle-eyed story about what it means to be a friend, an artist, a teammate, and—for better and for worse—an American. The Strikeout Artist is a work of genius.

—Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

A few years ago in some dim tavern I heard about a novel in progress following Franz Kafka’s legendary season as a baseball pitcher. Well, that’s a premise to stir one’s expectation and fancy. And now here it is, The Strikeout Artist, and I find that it’s even grander than I imagined. This novel is funny, poignant, atmospherically rich, and winningly weird, and I loved the time I spent in this world.

—Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special

You don’t have to know anything about baseball to fall in love with this astonishing novel in which Franz Kafka performs as an unlikely star pitcher. Delighted by Bates’s kinetic, daring plot, you’ll have to stop often to laugh, then in the next moment you’ll be drawn up short in wonder by the surprisingly tender heart of this novel. Bates writes about people lurching in despair and yet redeemed by loss. A novel about failure that’s a marvelously wrought success.

—Lee Upton, author of Visitations and The Tao of Humiliation

Joseph Bates is the author of the story collection Tomorrowland and a book on writing craft, The Nighttime Novelist. He teaches in the creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 414 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-391-1

$22

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