The Devil's Snake Curve

A humorous, historical, and hirsute miscellany that’s the baseball book Howard Zinn would have written, if he hated the Yankees.

The Devil’s Snake Curve offers an alternative American history, in which colonialism, jingoism, capitalism, and faith are represented by baseball. Personal and political, it twines Japanese internment camps with the Yankees; Walmart with the Kansas City Royals; and facial hair patterns with militarism, Guantanamo, and the modern security state. An essay, a miscellany, and a passionate unsettling of Josh Ostergaard’s relationship with our national pastime, it allows for both the clover of a childhood outfield and the persistence of the game’s service to those in power. America and baseball are both hard to love or leave in this, by turns coruscating and heartfelt, debut.

Publication date: April 15, 2014

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 256 pages

ISBN: 9781566893459

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Josh Ostergaard holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an MA in cultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been an urban anthropologist at the Field Museum and now works at Graywolf Press.

“Josh Ostergaard, emerges from an ironic generation that tends to regard hero worship as faintly ridiculous, meaning that individual legends from any given era are less interesting to him than whatever social, cultural, or political forces might have combined to prop those legends up.” 

—The New York Times

“Expansive and inventive. . . . A challenging reconsideration of a game that used to be called the national pastime.” 

—The Star Tribune

“Smart, funny and wholly unique.”

—Lucas W. Mann, author of Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“I thought I wasn’t interested in baseball until I read this book. It’s like a box of eclectic baseball cards about our country and our culture—curious, compelling, and disturbing in turn.”

—Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man’s Land

“One of the most fascinating books ever written about baseball.” 

—Cultural Weekly

“This graceful, quietly humorous and thought-provoking collection of anecdotes probes deeply into the meaning behind each parcel of information to capture what baseball was in the days before what baseball is now.”

—MinnPost

“Ostergaard is an incisive, intelligent writer. . . . The book is a brilliant exercise in sequence and transition, with dozens of short sections carefully laid out in order to maximize inference and suggestion.”

—The Corresponder

“This book is like a day at the ballpark. Histories are the murmurs between innings. They are the pitches that make up a game. They careen off the wall and roll into dark corners. The game is played in fragments. Meanings accrue. Memories interrupt history.” 

—Joy of Sox

“Even in the lengthy tradition of baseball literature, The Devil’s Snake Curve defies easy comparison.” 

—The Classical

“Unique, insightful, humorous and worth reading. It is a kind of radical and high subjective view of the national pastime, a kind of ‘Fargo’ of baseball books.” 

—Epoch Times

“Ostergaard seamlessly meshes baseball with pop culture and politics, both in the U.S. and around the world.”

—Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf

“Ostergaard draws the reader into his passionate perspective, and leaves us reflecting on the state of our country.” 

—City Pages