Jerome Charyn
Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins
Ping-pong and the Art of Staying Alive

Now in paperback!

"Charyn is a magician. He's also sui generis. There isn't another writer in America even remotely like him. He's published about three dozen books, and to the best of my knowledge appallingly few of them have found the readers they deserve. The literary establishment ignores him, too. Can't some justice be done? Can't the people who give out prizes … recognize … the culmination of a career that sooner or later will be recognized as among the singular and remarkable ones in American literature? Come on, give this guy a Pulitzer, help him find readers. No one deserves it more." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

"A grand celebration … A significant contribution to the literature of alienation and marginality. Only the strange play table tennis, and it is Charyn's achievement to explain why." —Daily Telegraph (London)

"An amazing work of weightless erudition and moving autobiography. What Hemingway did to explain and glamorize the bullfight and its tragic arena, Charyn does for the table top. No matador seems more exciting, more heroic than Charyn's men at their bat." —Frederic Tuten, author of Van Gogh's Bad Cafe: A Love Story

Ping-pong cast a hypnotic spell on Jerome Charyn's imagination early and held on for a lifetime. In a newly redesigned edition with rare photographs, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins chronicles Charyn's quixotic obsession with the sport, from the lure of hustling pongistes to the great pioneers of ping-pong lore. Charyn portrays ping-pong's most memorable players, from Marty "the Needle" Reisman — ship by the advent of the sponge bat, the technological innovation that ruined Reisman's rhythm for the game with its syncopated thud — to Dick Miles, the pensive introvert with the wicked backhand spin. Charyn tells of storied matches, wherein a single volley could last for hours and a game between champions found in the underground poolhalls of New York City; of the crucial American contribution (the cellulose ball) that took table tennis away from the gentlemen's club and onto the streets.

From the political manipulation of international ping-pong diplomacy to the migration of the sport from bars and poolhalls to the playlands of Las Vegas and the convention centers of Florida, Charyn finds a magic and a symmetry, a grace and a synergy in the playing of ping-pong. A truly original voice in American letters, he has written an astonishing and mesmerizing chronicle capturing the quirky excitement and the anarchic spirit of ping-pong's golden age.

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than thirty books, including The Isaac Quartet and Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land. He lives in New York and Paris, where he is a member of the Paris-based U.S. Metro ping-pong team and teaches film at the American University of Paris.