Extra Innings Read Online Free PDF

sturdy and wears its seventy-four years with a certain resignation if not grace. And what is most gratifying, like me who am almost the same age, it still runs.
    I regard it as a fitting metaphor for me, rickety but in some ways still somewhat serviceable, of a respectable vintage and a discreet color (black). Both it and the one manufactured a year later, the year of my birth, lack chrome because the Great War was making use of that metal.
    The mail brings more reviews. Every time I see those Xeroxes in their fat Norton envelope my heart sinks. Sometimes I have to put them down and compose myself before I have the courage to read the fine print. Today there is one from Dave Wood, a long column that he writes for the Minneapolis Star & Tribune . He makes the appropriate admission that he is a friend of mine (from our joint service on the board of the National Book Critics Circle) and then says End Zone surprised him because he never thought all this was going on within me.
    I understand this comment. It is curious to read books written by friends or acquaintances, especially if they are autobiographical, and to realize how little one has really known about the writers, how much one has been unable even to guess about them. Finding their lives fixed strangely to the page by their own hand is something like being in a foreign city and coming upon a married friend from home accompanied by a lady not his wife. Shock. Why is he here? Who is she? What is going on? How is it I never guessed? Did I really know him at all? Truly, we know almost nothing about each other, no matter how close or closely related we are, and what we think we know often turns out to be mistaken.
    This is my third September in Maine, the third time I have watched leaves turn abruptly to yellow or occasionally to red. (As early as the sixteenth century, the OED informs me, the word ‘fall’ appeared in the English language for the season in which the leaves drop.) So this season is as properly called fall as autumn.
    I sense the water in the Cove growing chilly and hostile to swimmers, seabirds, and summer boats.… Working on a new novel, I find it hard to shut out entirely the world of cities, Washington and New York, that I thought I had left behind. The telephone rings often from those places. End Zone is making its gallant little way into areas beyond the Cove. People call, or write, or stop by to say they have read it. Norton’s Fran Rosencrantz, who handles such things, makes a few plans for me to ‘appear.’ Radio hosts ask for interviews. These I do not mind doing, since on radio I do not need to worry about having my hair cut or wearing makeup, procedures I had to suffer through the year I did book reviews once a month on The MacNeil/ Lehrer News Hour . Oh, the anguish, the shock of recognition, at seeing one’s face on a TV screen, looking large, lined, and elderly, even with hair cut and lipstick applied.
    A few radio interviews are scheduled—one with Noah Adams at my old home station, National Public Radio. This kind of ‘promotion’ causes me to wonder: How much more of interest do I have to say that I have not already said in the book? Will not some of the same people hear more than one interview, and be taken aback at the poverty of my replies? Will I not repeat myself, thus sounding somewhat senile? Except to hope that talking about the book may sell a few copies, I can think of no reason for this further indecent exposure.
    End of the month: At six o’clock last evening a longtime acquaintance, Morris Philipson, called. He is a good novelist and a fine editor (he directs the University of Chicago Press). He says he is much taken with End Zone . I listen with embarrassed pleasure while he goes on about its virtues. He adds that he would like to publish, in paper, two of my novels now long out of print. At this point my pleasure knows no bounds. I ask him to talk to Tim Seldes, my agent. He says he