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The Most Fun Thing
Dispatches from a Skateboard Life
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around August 10, 2021. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • Southwest Review • Electric Literature
Perfect for fans of Barbarian Days, this memoir in essays follows one man's decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and explores how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old.
In January 2012, creative writing professor and novelist Kyle Beachy published one of his first essays on skate culture, an exploration of how Nike’s corporate strategy successfully gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. Beachy has since established himself as skate culture's freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime he first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood.
What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of forty, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion cemented in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married?
Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime—often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths. THE MOST FUN THING is both a rich account of a hobby and a collection of the lessons skateboarding has taught Beachy—and what it continues to teach him as he strugglesto find space for it as an adult, a professor, and a husband.
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Praise
“With the studied curiosity he’s established as a writer and critic, Beachy applies his honest, thoughtful prose to a wealth of seemingly disparate genres, binding them to create a work equal parts lively and insightful, intimate and universal, something his very own.”
—Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot