The legendary cable television sports broadcaster takes a humorous look back on the fight game—as seen from a ringside seat.For more than thirty years, Al Bernstein has been one of the most recognizable and respected sportscasters in America. In those three decades, the "voice of boxing" reported the funny, poignant, and bizarre events that helped shape sports television, ESPN, boxing, Las Vegas, and SHOWTIME. With an eclectic cast of characters that includes every...

“‘Harry, this is Leonard. I just wanted you to know I watched your film on me and it struck me I never thanked you enough at the time for the magnificent gift you gave with that film. Call me.’Then he left his personal number.” Harry Rasky, April 2000.No other book about Leonard Cohen gets so close to the man, his city, his poems and songs, his friends, his background, and the many original influences that forged this world-famous poet, songwriter and performer as the Song of Leonard Cohen...

Deep in the desolate steppe, Captain Khabarov waits out his service at a camp where the news arrives in bundles of last year’s papers and rations turn up rotting in their trucks. The captain hopes for nothing more from life than a meagre pension and a state-owned flat. Until, one Spring, he decides to plant a field of potatoes to feed his half-starved men . . .This blackly comic novel shows the unsettling consequences of thinking for yourself under the Soviet system. Oleg Pavlov’s first no...

Seventeenth century Russia, New Jerusalem Monastery. The recently deposed Patriarch Nikon, whose reforms lead to a schism in the Orthodox church, employs a French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming of Christ. Jacques de Sertan’s troupe consists of untrained and illiterate peasants. The actors are divided into roles, whole families play different social or ethnic groups that lived in Jerusalem around the time of Christ. No one, however, is allowed to play the ...

In the chaos of early-1990s Russia, the wife and stepdaughter of a paralyzed veteran conceal the Soviet Union’s collapse from him in order to keep him―and his pension―alive until it turns out the tough old man has other plans. Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die tells the story of how two women try to prolong a life―and the means and meaning of their own lives―by creating a world that doesn’t change, a Soviet Union that never crumbled. After her stepfather’s stroke, Marina hangs Bre...

Late Soviet stagnation, Moscow. Alyosha a writer who suffers from fits accompanied by memory loss admits himself to a psychiatric institute for experimental treatment. Inspired by Ivan the Terrible’s “Memorial Book of the Disgraced” and his own spiritual crisis, Alyosha has been trying to record the memories of people in his life who “died before their time, leaving nothing behind except in my memory”. In hospital, however, he changes tack and decides to dedicate his Memorial Book to the m...

The second book in Kilpatrick's Power of the Blood World, NEAR DEATH is the story of the vampire David Lyle Hardwick - a poet who for over a century has lived in the unholy world of the undead, resisting his thirst for blood. Zero, a beautiful, wounded mortal, is sent to destroy him but falls for his seductive power and together they set out in search of his enemies. As their torrid love affair grows, so too does David's unspeakable tormented desire. He is becoming Nosferatu, and when his ...

The Matiushin Case is among the most powerful recent works of Russian fiction. Deriving, like Captain of the Steppe (2013, And Other Stories), from Oleg Pavlov's experience of the declining Soviet Union, it follows Matiushin, a young man damaged by brutality at home and then in the army. Drawing on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "labor-camp writing," Oleg Pavlov builds a unique tension between the horrors of conscription and the dreamlike, timeless mode of his writing. Matiushin's "crime and pun...

In the vast Kazakh steppes of the crumbling Soviet Empire, Alyosha has finished his army service and is promised a gift from his deaf commander: an everlasting steel tooth. As he waits for it in the infirmary, he agrees to help out a medical officer, and they set out on a journey that takes them all the way to the kingdom of the dead. Oleg Pavlov's kaleidoscope of a tale is peopled with soldiers and prisoners, hoboes and refugees and mice that steal medicines. Their surreal inner world is ...

"A rollicking oral history of ESPN" (Boston Globe)—an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the network that changed how we watch sports."A serious, impressive piece of work." — Entertainment WeeklyIt began, in 1979, as a modest idea of starting a cable channel to televise local sporting events throughout the state of Connecticut. Today, ESPN is arguably the most successful network in modern television history, spann...

Whether he was scoring top-shelf goals or crushing an opponent into the boards, Jeremy Roenick—widely known as J.R.—was never shy about the way he played hockey. As much as he mixed it up in front of the net, J.R., an NHL veteran of twenty years with five different teams, often found himself in the middle of controversy off the ice as well. Above all else, J.R. was an entertainer, never afraid to dance on the blue line to liven up a game or to spend time with the fans. Now, as a hockey bro...

In this highly entertaining and insightful memoir, one of television’s most respected broadcasters interweaves the story of his life and career with lively firsthand tales of some of the most thrilling events and fascinating figures in modern sports.No sportscaster has covered more major sporting events than Al Michaels. Over the course of his forty-plus year career, he has logged more hours on live network television than any other broadcaster in history, and is the only play-by-p...