Game at the End of the World

Juan Villoro is a prize-winning Mexican author, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. His books have been translated into multiple languages. Several of his books have appeared in English, including his celebrated 2016 essay collection on soccer brought out by Restless Books, God Is Round. Villoro lives in Mexico City and has been a visiting lecturer at Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. Francisco Cantú is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright, a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, an Art for Justice fellowship, and the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano Literature. His writing and translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review, Granta, Guernica, and VQR, as well as on This American Life. He lives in Tucson, where he is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and a co-coordinator of the Field Studies in Writing Program and the oral history archive DETAINED: Voices from the Migrant Incarceration System.

“Juan Villoro is one of my all-time people—a genuine public intellectual who wears his own importance lightly, and a truly gifted writer who manages to be hilarious, incisive, and meaningful all at once. A book by Villoro about futbol, his favorite sport, is something of an apotheosis. The Game at the End of the World is simply a delight, and a must-read for aficionados of 'the people’s game,' or for anyone who loves a damned good story, well told.”— Jon Lee Anderson“Villoro’s winning collection of soccer essays and reporting includes gratifying entries on fandom, rivalries, scandals, coaches, officials, and players both famed and obscure.”— Kirkus Reviews“The Game is a fascinating page-turner, a must-read for fans of football in particular and sports in general. In fact, it will enthrall almost any reader because it showcases excellent writing’s rare ability to elucidate connections between individual life stories and emotions and experiences that are continually shared, debated, relived, and recounted across the world.“— Ryan Long, World Literature Today“This brilliant book by Juan Villoro, one of the world’s most literary aficionados of the sport of fútball/soccer, contains everything you need to know about its history, its heroes, its joys and its sorrows. It is also seems to me a magnificent handbook to the forthcoming World Cup.”— Paul Theroux, author of Dark Star Safari“From fútbol’s origins to its major players, legendary rivalries, thrilling matches, and lore, this is going to be a great read for anyone with a love of the game.”— Book Riot