Playing in Time

Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

From jazz fantasy camp to running a movie studio; from a fight between an old guy and a fat guy to a fear of clowns—Carlo Rotella’s Playing in Time delivers good stories full of vivid characters, all told with the unique voice and humor that have garnered Rotella many devoted readers in the New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, and Washington Post Magazine, among others. The two dozen essays in Playing in Time, some of which have never before been published, revolve around the themes and obsessions that have characterized Rotella’s writing from the start: boxing, music, writers, and cities. What holds them together is Rotella’s unique focus on people, craft, and what floats outside the mainstream. “Playing in time” refers to how people make beauty and meaning while working within the constraints and limits forced on them by life, and in his writing Rotella transforms the craft and beauty he so admires in others into an art of his own.

“It’s a tremendous pleasure to tour America with Carlo Rotella, whose essays take us from a Slovenian-Cleveland-style polka club in Chicago, to a ‘jazz fantasy camp’ in upstate New York, to the Las Vegas mall where Floyd Mayweather Jr. is getting a pedicure. Full of sharp dialogue, true to the ideals of craft and adventure, this essay collection reads like a great road novel.”

– Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed

“Carlo Rotella is an old-fashioned journalist in the best sense of the term: he doesn’t just visit the people and places he writes about, he inhabits them. His articles and essays are models of empathy and understanding. And because he is a man who appreciates craft— the craft of boxers, fencers, musicians, and clowns—his own work always strikes the right celebratory note, the one that ends with just the slightest inflection of melancholy—which, unparadoxically, is what makes his work a pleasure to read.”

– Arthur Krystal, author of Except When I Write

“Like other greats of the nonfiction craft—Joan Didion, John Jeremiah Sullivan—Rotella’s own personality eventually comes through.”

– Time Out Chicago