Playing Days - by Benjamin Markovits (Paperback)

About the Book

"Originally published in Great Britain in 2011 by Faber and Faber"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

In print for the first time in the United States, acclaimed novelist Benjamin Markovits's Playing Days is a mostly autobiographical narrative concerning the author's season playing minor league professional basketball in Germany and the love affair with another player's estranged wife that ushers him into adulthood.

Growing up in Texas, Ben experienced basketball as a mostly solitary pursuit, one he gave up after riding the bench in high school. But as his college classmates prepare for the real world, Ben is seized by an idea. All he needs is a video camera, an empty court, and his mother's German citizenship.

Improbably, he lands a roster spot on a lower division pro team in Landshut, forty-five minutes outside of Munich. It's Ben's first taste of competition in years, not to mention his first job. And like most jobs, it's defined by repetition, boredom, and gossip. There's Charlie, the trash-talking mercenary from Chicago; the coach, Herr Henkel, a recently retired player anxious to justify his paycheck; and Karl (based on the author's real life relationship with Dirk Nowitski), a gangly teenage prodigy flashing the raw talent that will make him an NBA star. As a group of men learn how to navigate one another, Ben falls in love with the young mother of a teammate's child, and begins an affair that will change his life.

Wry, poignant, and tenderly observed, Playing Days is an evocative meditation on the joys of youth, the triumphs and terrors of post-college life, and one of the best books ever written about what basketball can mean to an American man.

From the Back Cover

"Excellent." --The Times (London)

Growing up in Texas, Ben experienced basketball as a mostly solitary pursuit, one he gave up after riding the bench in high school. But as his college classmates prepare for the real world, Ben is seized by an idea. All he needs is a video camera, an empty court, and his mother's German citizenship.

Improbably, he lands a roster spot on a lower division pro team in Landshut, forty-five minutes outside Munich. It's Ben's first taste of competition in years, not to mention his first job. And like most jobs, it's defined by repetition, boredom, and gossip. There's Charlie, the trash-talking mercenary from Chicago; the coach, Herr Henkel, a recently retired player anxious to justify his paycheck; and Karl (based on the author's real life encounters with Dirk Nowitzki), a gangly teenage prodigy flashing the raw talent that will make him an NBA star. As a group of men learn how to navigate one another, Ben falls in love with the young mother of a teammate's child, and begins an affair that will change his life.

"Markovits draws [himself] with exceptional delicacy. . . . This is the territory of the rites-of-passage novel, but it is territory that the author navigates with subtlety and poignancy."--The Guardian (London)

Review Quotes

"[A] frank, disarming autobiographical novel...In scenes that are striking both for their insight and for the chasteness of their characters' behavior, Markovits effectively portrays Benjamin's stumbling entry into the adult world...the affecting story of a young man starting to find his way in the world through basketball." - Shelf Awareness
"PLAYING DAYS...succeeds in combining an emotionally honest coming-of-age narrative with a convincing evocation of the artificial, cynical, yet curiously idealistic, world of preofessional sport." - The Times Literary Supplement
"Playing Days is a humble and sensitive portrayal of a young adult trying to find his feet on the basketball court and in the world...The subtlety of Playing Days is that though the subjects for interpretation are teased out, the ultimate meaning is left poised for our own consideration." - The Financial Times
"It is a kind of rite of passage, but he turns it into so much more: a novel about failure, masculinity, sons and fathers, Jews and Germans...The story's overwhelming effect is of a powerfully bitter-sweet range of choices and failure, of what becomes of lonely young men when their dreams go sour." - Jewish Chronicle
"Markovits's plot is as smoothly nonchalant as a sea breeze in summer, yet the reader is enticed by his subtle yet powerful characterization and a wonderfully lucid writing style...His story becomes almost unbearably appealing as it ratches up towards a magnificently suspenseful and apt conclusion." - The Sunday Business Post
"This unusual autobiographical episode is lit up by Markovits' eye for psychological and social detail...Both matter of fact and acutely observant, it wears its wisdom with a shrug." - The Independent
"[A] frank, disarming autobiographical novel....Contemplating his writing career, the narrator confesses to Anke that he wants to write stories about "people who don't have any major flaws, who don't do anything stupid or wrong, and who don't suffer from any unusual bad luck." Modest as that ambition may seem, it's precisely what Benjamin Markovits has done here. That he's done it so artfully makes Playing Days such a pleasing novel." - Shelf Awareness
"Excellent." - The Times (London)
"Markovits is an exceptionally adept chronicler of human interaction... in this elegant, thoughtful novel." - New Statesman
"Markovits draws himself with exceptional delicacy...This is the territory of the rites-of-passage novel, but it is territory that the author navigates with subtlety and poignancy." - The Guardian
"PLAYING DAYS delivers a sharply honest account of the mostly selfish impulses of a young man...astutely rendering the restlessness of that ill-fitting period between schooling and manhood, in which mettle needs to be found before it can be tested." - The Independent
"Precision, clarity and seriousness give his style an admirable restraint, instilled with compassion for each character's struggle...a personal story [lifts] into a more intriguing one about losing and winning, an evocative sporting memoir into a tale of growing and becoming, and how ambition measures up with experience. It takes great skill to write this well about things that don't happen." - The Daily Telegraph