Confessions of a last-string quarterback

Paper Lion

The book that made a legend, and a classic of sports writing – George Plimpton's Paper Lion is published in the UK on its 50th anniversary.

A continuous feast... The best book ever about football - or anything!

A great book that makes football absolutely fascinating to fan and non-fan alike...a tale to gladden the envious heart of every weekend athlete... Plimpton has endless curiosity, unshakable enthusiasm and nerve, and a deep respect for the world he enters

The agility and imaginativeness of his prose transforms his account of this daydream into a classic of sports reporting

Possibly the most arresting and delightful narrative in all of sports literature

With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered.

The casual, curious, light-hearted precision of his prose is just as impressive as the way a great ball player can make the ball pop off his bat.

To suggest they have achieved classic status would be to devalue their still very immediate pleasures… [Plimpton] was a lyrical, precise observational writer, with a keen eye for human absurdity’.

What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton’s continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale…  A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert.

George Plimpton (1927-2003) was the bestselling author and editor of nearly thirty books, as well as the cofounder, publisher, and editor of the Paris Review. He wrote regularly for such magazines as Sports Illustrated and Esquire, and he appeared numerous times in films and on television.

In the mid-1960s, George Plimpton talked his way into the Detroit Lions’ pre-season training camp and in doing so set the bar for participatory sports journalism. With his characteristic wit, Plimpton recounts his experience of a month practising and living with the team – getting to know the pressures and tensions rookies confront, the hijinks, taking behind the scenes snaps and capturing a host of American football rites and rituals. 
 
Plimpton might not have made it as a quarterback, but fifty years after its first publication, Paper Lion remains one of the most insightful and entertaining classics of sports literature.

An Amateur in the Ring

Shadow Box

An amateur steps into the ring against a champion boxer ... Published for the first time in the UK, George Plimpton's masterpiece on boxing, Shadow Box

Excellent... The chapters on Muhammad Ali are delightful, and Ali is not easy to write about

With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered

What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton’s continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale…  A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert... It is a fan’s book, not only displaying the awe and devotional piety of the true fan but also the perils of the condition.

From the author of Paper Lion 
 
Stepping into the ring against light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, George Plimpton pauses to wonder what ever induced him to become a participatory journalist. Bloodied but unbowed, he holds his own in the bout – and brings back this timeless book on boxing and its devotees, among them Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. 
 
 
Shadow Box is one of Plimpton’s most engaging portraits of professional sport seen through the eyes of an inquisitive and astute hopeful. From the gym, the locker room, the ringside, and even in the harsh glare of the ring itself, Plimpton documents what it truly means to be a boxer in some of the finest writing of his career.

A Month on the PGA Tour

The Bogey Man

What happens when an average golf player joins the professional circuit for a month? George Plimpton finds out in this masterpiece of sports writing

Humorous but also agonizing and also unfailingly fascinating regardless of one's interest in golf. For the psychology of the sport - and this is what Mr. Plimpton is probing - there is nothing more revealing around

Plimpton will interest even the man who can't tell a pitching wedge from a putter... This is really a book about a kind of madness with rules, and anyone can appreciate the appeal of that

Golf is a lonely and private game, lacking the natural drama of football, but Plimpton, by subsituting improvisation for plot, has caught its mad comedy and bizarre effects on people in a book just as charming, in its own way, as Paper Lion

From the author of Paper Lion 
 
What happens when a weekend athlete – of average skill at best – joins the professional golf circuit? George Plimpton spent a month of self-imposed torture on the PGA tour to find out, meeting amateurs, pros, caddies, officials, fans and hangers-on along the way. 
 
In The Bogey Man we find golf legends, adventurers, stroke-saving theories, superstitions, and other golfing lore, and best of all, Plimpton’s thoughts and experiences – frustrating, humbling and, sometimes, thrilling – from the first tee to the last green.

A Professional Amateur in the World of Big-Time Hockey

Open Net

George Plimpton takes to the ice with the Boston Bruins in this memorable portrait of the rough-and-tumble world of professional ice hockey

A season with the Boston Bruins is the basis for Plimpton's absorbing personal report ... A winning entertainment for fans of sports, told with warmth and integrity

[Plimpton's] sojourn with the Bruins in training camp culminated in a five-minute stint in goal against the Philadelphia Flyers ... Plimpton tries valiantly to acquire the skills of the position and comes to his moment of truth

Plimpton’s charm proves irresistible. Once again, he gets the athletes to like him and to share with him their fears and oddest memories

After forays into American football, golf and the world of professional boxing, George Plimpton accepts his riskiest assignment yet: taking to the ice as goalie for his beloved National Hockey League team, the Boston Bruins. Signing a release holding the Bruins blameless if he should meet with injury or worse, his initiation into the league’s toughest tribe begins. But when the Bruins find themselves up against the equally fearsome Philadelphia Flyers, a mere five minutes in the rink can seem an eternity. 
 
Told with Plimpton’s characteristic humour and insight, Open Net is at once a celebration of the thrills and grace of the greatest sport on ice, and a probing meditation into the hopes and fears of every man.

Football Revisited

Mad Ducks and Bears

George Plimpton's follow-up to the classic Paper Lion, rejoining two of his former teammates in an insightful glimpse into the lives of professional sportspeople

[An] irreverent and roguish account of the lives of the two linesmen... Pure gold

From the author of Paper Lion 
 
Following his turn as a Detroit Lions rookie in Paper Lion, George Plimpton returns to the field of American football and focuses on the careers of his Lions teammates, Alex ‘Mad Duck’ Karras and John ‘the Bear’ Gordy. What he uncovers is a fond tribute to the values and follies of this brutal, but captivating game. 
 
Paper Lion was the quintessential look at a football team behind the scenes and its companion, Mad Ducks and Bears, offers an astute exploration into the fascinating lives, thoughts and motivations of the players at home, in the locker room, and on the field.

An Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball

Out of my League

From the author of Paper Lion. 
 
George Plimpton goes behind the scenes of a professional baseball team in the classic that Ernest Hemingway called ‘beautifully observed and incredibly conceived’

Beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, this account of a self-imposed ordeal has the chilling quality of a true nightmare. It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty

A baseball book such as no one else ever wrote, and one of the best ever

From the author of Paper Lion 
 
It began as a fun filled stunt and came to a deeply hellish, nearly humiliating end. George Plimpton had the chance to answer every baseball fan’s question: could I strike out a major league star? Out of My League chronicles what happened next as his inspired idea – to get on the mound and pitch a few innings to the All-Stars of the American and National Leagues – got seriously out of hand. 
 
The original foray into participatory journalism that started it all, Out of my League announced George Plimpton as a giant of sports journalism, able to penetrate deep into the very spirit of sport, with his characteristic wit, charm and grace.

Jean Stein

George Plimpton

Ottessa Moshfegh

An exceptionally seductive biography... You can't put it down... It has novelistic excitement

Through a kaleidoscope of seemingly fragmented voices, patterns form, giving brilliant definition to the very American tragedy of Edie Sedgwick, a woman...not likely to be forgotten after this haunting portrait

Jean Stein invented a form that many have tried to replicate since: the oral history biography. The voices in these pages give a sentimental education that is glamorous, dark, sexy, depraved, comical, and profound. Edie maps the follies and glories of an entire era—the Warhol 1960s.

American Girl

A brilliant and unique biography of Andy Warhol's tragic muse, the 60s icon Edie Sedgwick 
 
‘Exceptionally seductive… You can’t put it down’ LA Times 
 
Outrageous, vulnerable and strikingly beautiful - in the 1960s Edie Sedgwick became both an emblem of, and a memorial to, the doomed world spawned by Andy Warhol. 
 
Born into a wealthy New England Edie’s childhood was dominated by a brutal but glamourous father. Fleeing to New York, she became an instant celebrity, known to everyone in the literary, artistic and fashionable worlds. She was Warhol's twin soul, his creature, the superstar of his films and, finally, the victim of a life which he created for her. 
 
Jean Stein’s classic biography of Edie is an American fable on an epic scale - the story of a short, crowded and vivid life which is also the story of a decade like no other. 
 
‘Edie Sedgwick was the spirit of the sixties, and these pages capture her power to dazzle us… This is the book of the Sixties we have been waiting for’ Norman Mailer

George Plimpton

Praise for Edie

An exceptionally seductive biography... You can't put it down... It has novelistic excitement

Through a kaleidoscope of seemingly fragmented voices, patterns form, giving brilliant definition to the very American tragedy of Edie Sedgwick, a woman...not likely to be forgotten after this haunting portrait

There is no more classic summertime read

An exceptionally seductive biography... You can't put it down... It has novelistic excitement

Through a kaleidoscope of seemingly fragmented voices, patterns form, giving brilliant definition to the very American tragedy of Edie Sedgwick, a woman...not likely to be forgotten after this haunting portrait

There is no more classic summertime read

An exceptionally seductive biography... You can't put it down... It has novelistic excitement

Through a kaleidoscope of seemingly fragmented voices, patterns form, giving brilliant definition to the very American tragedy of Edie Sedgwick, a woman...not likely to be forgotten after this haunting portrait

There is no more classic summertime read

Books by George Plimpton

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