THE CLUBHOUSE THIEF
Published: January 2018, New Issues Poetry & Prose
ISBN-13: 978-1-936970-51-3
Agent: None
Availability: City Lights | Prairie Fox | Bookworks | Organic Books | Pilsen Community Books
Press Packet: Download PDF
“Part of me wanted to quit, let the Red Birds hammer us, and slink away to hibernate all winter. I had that old feeling of worthlessness running through me, and sadness, too. A coach, whatever his age, should be a reservoir of hope, but I, in my Cub heart, boarded a shipwreck, my own Titanic, and awaited the dark plunge into the familiarity of loss.” Billy Donachio, an aging coach for the Chicago Cubs, has never had a lucky day let alone a lucky year. Every team he has been part of and everything he has ever cared about has ended up in the dumps. When at last he’s able to be a part of a winner, a Chicago Cub team on the cusp of World Series victory, Billy struggles with neurosis. A thief, a kleptomaniac, he loots the lockers of his star players and comes away with notes, letters, a neighborhood newspaper, a photograph, a computer disc. By accident, Billy receives an education. Chicago Magazine “A shut-In’s Guide to Winter” (January 2018 ed.) recommends The Clubhouse Thief to get you through winter!
Praise for The Clubhouse Thief
“Reading The Clubhouse Thief is akin to listening to a Gustav Mahler symphony. Mahler’s symphonies have broad parallels to real life in the world; they meditate on nature, politics, religion, joy, death, suffering, identity, poetry, and literature. Mr. Janko’s novel has the same type of broad parallels, using baseball as his modus operandi.”
—Windy City Reviews
“The Clubhouse Thief is a baseball book the way Bernard Malamud’s The Natural is a baseball book…Here is a deep exploration of America, and how we create ourselves and our conscience and our country.”
—Maxine Hong Kingston, Author of The Woman Warrior
“The historic problem with sports fiction is that the fictional, internal dramas on display can’t compare with what we read in the best of sports biography. But with James Janko’s The Clubhouse Thief, we have sports fiction that rises to the level of art. Its intersection with sport is mere setting for the issues it explores. An absolute triumph.”
—Dave Zirin, Author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States
“Janko delivers a meditative and lyrical baseball novel…His prose is by turns thoughtful and poetic, and over the course of the story, he weaves together a multitude of voices. Each character has his or her own finely wrought cadence, and their actions throughout the plot are believable and well-earned…A spirited vision of America and its national game.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This is a romantic fiction of American baseball driven by superstition and enduring loyalty and set against the backdrop of Chicago, its history the converging American center of racial and political turmoil. The passionate desire of the game is threaded through an equal desire for racial equality and social justice and the history of athletes with political convictions. Not an avid fan nor very knowledgeable about baseball, I followed every pitch, hit, and steal with the same intensity of the telling, and I realized that I, too, really wanted the Cubs to win. Hilarious and heartbreaking.”
—Karen Tei Yamashita, Author of I Hotel, National Book Award Finalist