In these 25 stories about sporting contests from basketball and baseball to fishing and chess, celebrated writers from several nations spin tales of love, mystery, chicanery, luck, and perseverance. A. Conan Doyle's ace detective Sherlock Holmes solves a rugby mystery; Nobel prize winner Rudyard Kipling writes on polo; P. G. Wodehouse brings humor to golf; and Agatha Christie spins a tale about chess. The classical Russian poet and author Alexander Pushkin builds a story around another card game, faro, and from Guy de Maupassant comes a fascinating fishing yarn. American Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Ford and Paul Horgan write about hunting, while Ring Lardner and W. P. Kinsella prefer baseball, and for Ethan Canin, basketball is the inspiration. Ping-pong, bullfighting, and Mark Twain's hilarious frog-jumping contest also appear in these pages, which will amuse, energize, and astonish both dedicated sports enthusiasts and lovers of short fiction. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.