Juan Villoro's God is Round Joins the Best Football/Soccer Books of All Time

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Soccer—or, as it is known to most of its many fans, football—is an international language. On a planet where FIFA has more members than the United Nations and the World Cup is watched by three billion people, football is more than just a game. In God is Round: Tackling the Giants, Villains, Triumphs, and Scandals of the World's Favorite Game, Juan Villoro ("one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters... [and] also one of the best writers on football in the world" —Spectator), follows the tradition of great Latin American authors who have trained their pen on the world's favorite sport, and the critics are raving, calling it "soulful" (The Boston Globe), "unbelievably outstanding (Howler), "timeless" (Los Angeles Review of Books) and "perfect" (International Soccer Network). Read on for details.  

Rave Reviews for God is Round from Around the World

The Spectator: ‘Juan Villoro is the best football writer you've never heard of’

“Latin Americans... tend not to make the distinction between literature and sports writing. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, both Nobel laureates, took to writing about the game early on in their careers. Juan Villoro is one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters. A renowned novelist, short-story writer and translator into Spanish of authors as diverse as Graham Greene, Goethe and Truman Capote, Villoro has shown... his Borgesian range of being as at home with D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats as he is with the Hispanic canon. Unlike Borges, who loathed the game, Villoro is also one of the best writers on football in the world. Early on in this remarkable collection of essays, Villoro sets out his stall as a writer of sport…. God is Round will of course draw comparison with Eduardo Galeano’s paean to the game, Football in Sun and Shadow. Where Galeano hitched the lyrical to hyperbole, Villoro is a far more honest writer and thinker…. In successfully marrying his love of literature and football, Villoro has demonstrated the first principle of sports writing, or any good writing for that matter.”

—Andreas Campomar, The Spectator

The Boston Globe: 'Strange and soulful as the game itself'

"In these lyrical essays about the beautiful game — the one we call soccer and everyone else calls football — Villoro mines the psychological and emotional depths of what the sport represents, and what it means, and feels like, to be a fan. Many of these pieces center on the way sports can evoke a state of childlike wonder, blending our joy of play with our deepest associations with our parents, our neighborhood, our city…. Strange and soulful as the game itself, Villoro’s pieces will send many readers to Wikipedia to check out key plays and legendary players... [The book] captures something ineffable about what it means to love a team and a sport. This makes Villoro’s scathing takedown of soccer’s governing body even more poignant.”

—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

FourFourTwo Magazine Gives God is Round Four Stars

“Mexico’s answer to Bill Bryson, Villoro has spent his life watching football. This collection of essays range from straighter profiles of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi to touching odes to fandom. His description of Savo Milosevic holding court at the Bernabeu for Osasuna is worth the price of the book alone.”

—FourFourTwo

Bookforum: ‘Only writing as good as Villoro’s can actually accomplish the feat.’

“Villoro manages to bring some of that magic back into relief—to make it strange and new again. There are countless experts who can rattle off Luis Ronaldo’s career stats, but this won’t capture the player’s haphazard and bizarrely successful style anywhere near as well as Villoro’s description…. But God Is Round’s real value lies not in its ideas but in the approach Villoro takes to soccer writing.... By marshaling his imagination and linguistic resources, Villoro is able to resuscitate the rich childhood fascination that originally got us praying to the “weekend god.” This is the goal of most expressions of fandom, but only writing as good as Villoro’s can actually accomplish the feat.”

—Bookforum

Howler Magazine Dummy Podcast: ‘An unbelievably outstanding collection of essays about soccer’

“a fascinating look at the big characters and funny details from the world of soccer.… A literary hero of mine… [He’s in the] top three soccer writers for me…. So good!… an unbelievably outstanding collection of essays about soccer.… Brilliant writer.… It’s like seeing the game with new eyes.”

  —George Quraishi, Howler Podcast

NBC News Interview with Juan Villoro

NBC News Latino features Juan Villoro's God Is Round with an interview with the author, whom they call “Mexico's top fútbol expert.” The conversation examines soccer as a kind of religion and soccer teams as models for ideal societies, and connects recent FIFA scandals with the release of the Panama Papers. Villoro also discusses the status of American soccer.

Read the interview on NBC News

Los Angeles Review of Books’ The Eephus: “Timeless”

“Juan Villoro’s God Is Round takes an all-encompassing approach, finding a welcome overlap between writing about soccer as metaphor and writing about soccer for the sake of writing about soccer.… At times the effect of Villoro’s book can feel like the distillation of several decades’ worth of great soccer writing, filtered through a broader literary lens. And that hearkens to a kind of tradition, too: the effect that books as disparate as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and John King’sThe Football Factory have had in drawing people to the sport.… [A] timeless set of observations about the sport.”

—The Eephus, Los Angeles Review of Books

Kirkus Gives God is Round a Starred Review

"A lyrical exploration of the global game of soccer. In the most prosaic sense, Villoro is a Mexican journalist and professor of literature. But when he writes about soccer, these job titles are insufficient. When tackling the beautiful game, the author is a poet and a critic, a philosopher and a historian, a keen observer and a devoted fan.... Villoro brings some memorable line, some delightful turn of phrase, some inescapable image to every page. Readers will be reminded of a similar stylist, Eduardo Galeano, whose Soccer in Sun and Shadow has always represented the literary apogee of writing about soccer.... For millions around the world, soccer is not just a game, but rather life itself and, as Villoro ably reveals, very much worth pursuing to the final whistle.”

—Kirkus (starred review)

International Soccer Network: 'The most anticipated football title of 2016'

“The most anticipated football title of 2016.... [Villoro] is the perfect person for this title.... God Is Round is real literature, not just another book about football. Villoro’s words are like poetry, rich and full of meaning.... God Is Round is certainly on par with David Goldblatt’s The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer and Eduard Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow, arguably the finest football titles ever written. If you can only purchase one book this year, it has to be God Is Round. Football fans and those that enjoy great literature will be equally enthralled with this one.”

—International Soccer Network 

World Literature Today: 'an indispensable companion to international soccer'

“Reading God Is Round will make fans of soccer and good writing alike wonder how they appreciated either before they read Villoro’s insightful, critical, and ultimately hopeful take on the world’s game.... God Is Round is not only an indispensable companion to international soccer but also a fine introduction of US readers to an award-winning Mexican author whose talent and skill demand that more of his work—novels, short stories, essays, and chronicles—be translated into English.”   

—World Literature Today

Carlos Fuentes: 'Go talk to Juan Villoro'

“If you want to talk about soccer, go talk to Juan Villoro.”

—Carlos Fuentes

The New York Times: 'one of Mexico’s most decorated and esteemed writers'

“In trying times like these, when the anguish and uncertainty can be almost too much to bear, Mexico turns to him, its philosopher-fanatic, to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical.... Juan Villoro, one of Mexico’s most decorated and esteemed writers — who also happens to be a leading soccer analyst—comes charging down the metaphorical field to scold, explain and extract the lessons within.”

—The New York Times

The New Yorker: 'boyishly effusive, brimming with laughter and cleverness'

“[Villoro] has assumed the Octavio Paz mantle of Mexican public wise man of letters (though with none of Paz’s solemnity, for Villoro is as boyishly effusive, brimming with laughter and cleverness, as Paz was paternalistically dour—and, of course, Villoro, the author of the book God Is Round, may be the most fútbol-obsessed man alive)”

—Francisco Goldman, The New Yorker

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Francine Prose Introduces a New Illustrated Frankenstein

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The horror, the horror….

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Frankenstein

We can all picture Frankenstein’s monster, but can we really conjure the dread and terror of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus?  A classic in its two-hundredth year of life, the masterpiece has indeed proved immortal, and is even more popular today than it was upon publication. But the popularity of the book has sometimes dimmed the horror of the original image: a man created from the salvaged anatomy of the recently buried dead.

The tempestuous tale of Frankenstein’s origins is almost as good as the resulting novel. Mary Shelley had just run away with the still-married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her meddling stepsister, Claire, was along for the trip. This uneasy threesome met with Lord Byron, who had become Claire’s lover, and his physician, John William Polidori, at Lac Leman in Switzerland for the summer season. Cold and heavy rains (the consequence of an Indonesian volcanic eruption the year before) put a damper on their holiday. On Byron’s suggestion, the group resorted to telling ghost stories (and one presumes other amusements), with each member of the party charged with writing his or her own chilling tale. No inspiration came to Mary—until the vision for Frankenstein appeared in a dream, one so terrifying that she knew she had to replicate the sensation in her readers. This June, two hundred years after that fateful night, we’ll be releasing a very special edition of Frankenstein, the second book in our Restless Classics line.

The acclaimed novelist and critic Francine Prose, in her introduction to our edition, makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of this towering work of gothic fiction. Prose speculates that Mary Shelley was likely influenced not only by her dream and the stormy lakeside retreat, but also by her second pregnancy:

Mary was pregnant with Shelley’s second child, doubtless a source of anxiety since her first child, Clara, had died soon after birth and Mary’s own mother had died in childbirth. Little wonder, then, that the story Mary wrote would be so thoroughly steeped in violence, in grief, in loneliness and fear, in remorse and guilt.

Now, even as medical technology brings increased security to childbirth, its advances bring back to life the old questions Mary Shelley originally tangled with: "What is a human being? Is it dangerous to play god? What are the ethical implications and limits of scientific research?"

The delusion of reason: Eko illustrates Frankenstein

In tandem with Francine Prose’s introduction, the fiercely original Mexican artist Eko brings readers back the gothic horror of Shelley’s text with 26 original illustrations throughout the book. In his illustrator’s introduction, Eko writes:

The scientist Hippolyte Cloquet described writing his groundbreaking Treatise on Descriptive Anatomy “with scalpel in hand,” .... In this series of ink drawings I use as a base the pages of a French anatomy book from the period during which Mary Shelley wrote her novel; the paper is an artistic setting, historic and aesthetic, and the information and the forms of the letters are Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory. With my drawings I continue Dr. Frankenstein’s line of thinking and ask the same questions he asks: Is it right for science to create human beings? Is that “creature,” that “monster” the consequence of human arrogance? Is being familiar with anatomy enough to know what it means to be human? Francisco de Goya writes on one of his etchings, “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” This monster is formed with human parts and comes to life with the force of electric energy—but still isn’t human. It’s the product of dreaming, of a delirious mentality. He doesn’t even exist; he is the fear that we have of our own work. My drawings, like the mind of Dr. Frankenstein, start with the delusion of reason.

A sneak peek at 10 of Eko's original illustrations 

Pre-order your copy of Restless Classics’ Frankenstein to read Francine Prose’s introduction, see all 26 of Eko’s illustrations, and reacquaint yourself with a timely 200-year-old masterpiece of gothic horror.

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Frankenstein
Frankenstein
$19.99

by Mary Shelley

Introduction by Francine Prose

Illustrations by Eko

Video Lecture Series by Wendy Steiner

Restless Classics

With a new introduction by Francine Prose and stunning original artwork by Eko, the Restless Classics edition of Frankenstein brings Mary Shelley’s paragon of horror vividly back to life—published to coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of the infamous night of its creation.

Deluxe Paperback • ISBN: 9781632060785
Publication date: June 14, 2016

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