Children
Penguin Classics
Spinebreakers
Five Dials
Penguin Dating
Blog
Podcast
Synopsis
Chronicled from the perspective of a fanatical youngster, through disillusioned adolescence, to an adult "who should know better", the author - an Arsenal fan - examines the absurdities and traumas of everyday life and football. Combines anecdote with a wider commentary on the state of the game.Reviews
Customer Review: 13 May 2005
Reviewer: Tambo98
Really, really authentic and funny at the same time. I enjoyed it very much and it seemed to me (I'm Italian and a sad fan of the International Football Club of Milan) to live the same emotions Hornby talks about Arsenal. In fact International FC never wins, always tries and buys champions and starts each year making us pretend to win...and nothing happens! That's fantastic.
» Submit a review
Customer Review: 11 September 2002Critic Review:
'A spanking 7-0 away win of a football book....inventive, honest, funny, heroic, charming'
Independent
''Whether you are interested in football or not, this is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest about Hornby's obsession and the state of the game. Fever Pitch is not only the best football book ever written, it's the funniest book of the year'
GQ
'An absolutely marvellous book'
Guardian
'Fever Pitch is a sophisticated study of obsession, families, masculinity, class, identity, growing up, loyalty, depression and joy. He should write for England'
Observer
'Fever Pitch transcends the mundane and the sporty to say something about the way we live'
Time Out
'His triumph is that, without glossing over its large-scale stupidities and discomforts, he makes the terrace life seem not just plausible but sometimes near heroic in its single-minded vehemence, its heart-shaking highs and lows'
Independent on Sunday
Interview
Penguin.co.uk: What were the circumstances surrounding the writing of Fever Pitch?NH: There was literate fan journalism about football and I felt that Fever Pitch reflected that culture. When I was talking to publishers and agents about it they told me no chance, trying to sell a football book. I think the view at the time was that as fans didn't even buy the hopeless, ghosted, football autobiographies, they couldn't understand what chance they would have with another sort of book. But I think they were looking at things the wrong way round. There was a market and an appetite for a better book about football, but there was still resistance within publishing. P: What were your hopes or ambitions for Fever Pitch as you wrote it?
NH: I hoped it would chime with people who followed a team seriously. I suspect that anyone who writes a book has two levels of ambition - the modest and the grandiose. I saw no reason why the book shouldn't appeal to lots of people, of different ages and genders and class. But of course you never seriously think that they're actually going to buy it! P: In the book you do talk a bit about how football has been a kind of glue with people. Tell us something about your teaching experience and the way you related to the kids through popular culture.
NH: I have always listened to a lot of pop music and I have always watched football, so you think, how hard can this be? But of course kids just presume that you know nothing about what they're interested in, and even if you do know something you start to feel kind of phoney. I can remember when I was on teaching practice, saying to this kid "I'm an Arsenal fan", and he just looked at me with complete contempt, as if my job automatically ruled me out from being able to go. P: I suppose kids do want to feel that there is territory that is theirs, and they just don't want adults coming into it.
NH: There was a clear generation gap between me and my parents, and really in the last twenty or thirty years there are two or three generations that have grown up completely within popular culture. So you're listening to the same stuff as your kids, which I think must be quite uncomfortable for them. P: There are quite a lot of class issues in Fever Pitch that are both buried but also rather explicitly dealt with.
NH: There's been this thing, probably ever since Fever Pitch, about how the middle classes have colonised football and that this is a completely new phenomena. I think if you were middle class you were certainly aware of it in football stadiums in the seventies, but I can remember talking to Tony Parsons about it, and he said "Who do they think has been sitting up in those seats for the last sixty years?" I think that the media tries to re-invent problems every 5 or 6 years and I think they've probably always been within football. But I think the class issue was important to address in Fever Pitch in a way that it wasn't in High Fidelity.
More
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY Tony Lacey, Nick Hornby's current editor, confesses his top editorial mistake of all time - turning down Fever Pitch… Every publisher who's been doing the job for a decent spell is bound to have skeletons in his cupboard; the wrong decisions that still make you wince in the middle of the night. After the initial pain I tend not to be overly bothered by the books that didn't sell or weren't critically admired - it's easy to tell yourself that the public or the critics were just plain wrong, and that history is littered with great books that had a rough ride at first. It's the ones that got away that continue to hurt. I once told an agent who had rejected my offer that the book he was selling was "a piece of American whimsy"; I now think, and perhaps even thought then, that it is an American masterpiece. Fever Pitch comes firmly into this category. Penguin were the runners-up in the auction, which was concluded at a not-very-high price. The puzzle, ten years later, is why on earth we didn't go the full distance. It's a book for which I'm the ideal reader - I can still remember the thrilling shock of recognition when I read it later as a finished book, that feeling which is rare but wonderful when you get it from a book, that it was describing something of my life to me in ways I hadn't read before. So why didn't we? A fellow publisher once said to me that he thought publishers subconsciously found it difficult to publish books they really, truly loved. It's a weird, almost charming thought, but I don't really believe it. I guess the real reason is down to a terrible old publishing cliché - believe it or not, and it's hard to now, there was a general belief that football books didn't sell. Never mind that there was a burgeoning generation of male readers who'd grown up on football; never mind that anyway the book was really about families, and adolescence, and class, and ... well, a lot of things besides football: football books, it was said, just didn't sell. But even here there's a puzzle: my very first acquisition as an editor when I came into publishing in the 70s had been Eamon Dunphy's Only a Game?, a now-classic account (still in print in Penguin), of playing the professional game. So I knew football books could sell, and I had already taken the professional plunge... I guess there's no point in picking over old bones. The book was published fantastically well by Gollancz, and became a huge bestseller as I watched with envious admiration. But there's an odd coda to the story. After the publication of Fever Pitch, Gollancz and Penguin jointly commissioned Nick to write a book about the American World Cup. The idea was that he would follow England's fortunes around the States. Like Fever Pitch, of course it was to be about other things besides football - how would someone who'd grown up with American culture through music, films and books react to the reality of the country itself? Unfortunately, England failed to qualify (I have an irrational dislike of Graham Taylor to this day, way beyond that felt by millions of other Englishmen who suffered with me) and the book was called off. It seemed pretty clear that we were fated not to publish Nick Hornby. Imagine my misery when the then marketing director of Waterstones, John Mitchison, pressed a proof copy of High Fidelity on me, and I discovered it was a masterpiece: original, funny, true, defining of a generation, and so on - all those things you read about in blurbs but usually turn out not to be true. Top five mistakes of all time: Fever Pitch, No. 1 every time.Product details
Format : Paperback
ISBN: 9780140293449
Size : 129 x 198mm
Pages : 256
Published : 05 Oct 2000
Publisher : Penguin
Other formats for Fever Pitch:
» ePub eBook: eBook : £8.00
Fever Pitch
£7.99
Related email updates
To keep up-to-date, input your email address, and we will contact you on publication or when the author releases another book.
Please alert me via email when:
