About Chad Harbach: Chad Harbach is an American writer. An editor at the journal n + 1, he is the author of the 2011 novel The Art of Fielding.
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
Owen," Henry said excitedly, "I think Coach wants you to hit for Meccini." Owen closed , on which he had recently embarked. "Really?" "Runners on first and second," Rick said. "I bet he wants you to bunt." "What's the bunt sign?" "Two tugs on the lef...
But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric - not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing foo...
Putting Henry at shortstop - it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before.
Why would anyone want to fight Henry?" Loondorf looked hurt. "Because he's a ballplayer." "So?" "So he's a baller. He's got cash, chains, crisp clothes. He's got a hat that says Yankees and it's the real deal, yo. He didn't buy it at no yard sale. He...
AVERT DISASTER, in fact, would have been a perfect school motto—the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults.
Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong.
Only here, long after midnight, while everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet.
It dawned on him—as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow—that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see hi...
So much of one's life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.
Heat radiated off Henry's face. Salty snot ran down his upper lip. A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium's curve. He slapped the sign as if high-fiving a teamate. It gave back a game shudder. He ...
I'm a staunch monogamist. In practice, if not in theory. I can't help it. Do I acknowledge the oppressive, regressive nature of sexual exclusivity? Yes. Do I want that exclusivity very badly for myself? Also yes. There's probably some sort of way in ...
He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.
Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.
For many years I didn't have health insurance.
American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.
I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.
There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.
