Andrew Forbes

Tenth Anniversary Edition, featuring a new introduction by the author. Spitball literary essays on the off-kilter joys, sorrows and wonder of North America’s national pastime. A collection of essays for ardent seamheads and casual baseball fans alike, The Utility of Boredom is a book about finding respite and comfort in the order, traditions, and rituals of baseball. It’s a sport that shows us what a human being might be capable of, with extreme dedication—whether we’re eating hot dogs in the stands, waiting out a rain delay in our living rooms, or practising the lost art of catching a stray radio signal from an out-of-market broadcast. From learning about America through ball-diamond visits to the most famous triple play that never happened on Canadian soil, Forbes invites us to witness the adult conversing with the O-Pee-Chee baseball cards of his youth. Tender, insightful, and with the slow heartbreak familiar to anyone who’s cheered on a losing team, The Utility of Boredom tells us a thing or two about the sport, and how a seemingly trivial game might help us make sense of our messy lives.

Roger Angell meets Hanif Abdurraqib meets Bull Durham in this sharp new collection of baseball writing by Andrew ForbesBaseball is a sport, a pastime, an obsession, a dream—and for some, it’s also a day job. A poetic survey of baseball’s rich history, Field Work shines a light on the people who make the game happen, from major-league stars and little-league coaches to gamblers, ballpark operators, and minor leaguers forging lives outside the dugout. With sharp-eyed observations and beautiful digressions, these essays portray the complex relationship between work and play—both on and off the field—to demonstrate how baseball is more than just a game.

"Andrew Forbes’s exquisitely rendered prose makes The Diapause both realistic and futuristic, devastating even while it is oddly hopeful. Vast and intimate, the novel absorbs and grips. I cannot shake its central image: the strange little noodles, the mysterious worms who seem to be dancing in the moments before catastrophe."—Liz Harmer, author of Strange LoopsWhen ten-year-old Gabriel and his parents retire to his late grandfather’s disused cabin to wait out a pandemic, the big, dangerous world seems very far away, and Gabriel enjoys the freest summer of his young life. But tensions begin to surface, testing the family unit, and resulting in consequences that he will spend his life attempting to unravel. Spanning nearly a half-century, The Diapause is a literary-speculative-fiction novel about the near future, family, isolation, heartbreak, climate change, how we keep each other safe, and all the things we don’t know about the people we know best. Part White Fang, part Station Eleven, The Diapause is a novel about how the things we seek are often the things we didn’t know we’d lost.

Piracy, or "robbery on the high seas," has existed for as long as people and commodities have traversed the oceans. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese all complained of it, and all created naval forces to fight pirates. The word "piracy" comes from the Latin pirate, "sea robber," and before that from the Greek pirates-"brigand," or "one who attacks." Piracy, however, has evolved over time, and this volume examines how piracy and ocean governance have changed from 1608, when the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius published his Mare Liberum The Freedom of the Seas, or the Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade]. As modern nation-states emerged from feudalism, privateering for both profit and war supplemented piracy at the margins of national sovereignty. More recently, an ocean enclosure movement under the aegis of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 has granted states access to maritime resources far beyond their territorial limits. This in turn has given states more responsibility for providing safe passage through their waters. This book provides case studies on how these developments have changed the ways in which nations deal with piracy. Who owns the sea? Who has rights of navigation through its waters? Who is responsible for protecting ships at sea? For most of human history, the high seas were seen as vast, dangerous, uncharted regions filled with demons and dragons. In premodern times, the sea was a space apart from society. 'Amr ibn al-'As, a seventh-century Arab military leader who was responsible for the conquest of Egypt in 640, observed, "The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; when calm, the sailor's heart is broken; when tempestuous, his senses reel. Trust it little, fear it much. Man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death." Throughout much of human history, therefore, it was assumed that the seas could not be owned, occupied, or governed. Fighting pirates at sea, although desirable, was beyond the jurisdiction and ability of most "states," whether feudal or national. As Grotius asserted in Mare Liberum, "The sea is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become a possession of any one, and because it is adapted for the use of all, whether we consider it from the point of view of navigation or of fisheries." Grotius's view was developed to counter the activities of, in particular, Spain and Portugal, who were using their navies to assert their global maritime spheres of influence. The Dutch and other Europeans also wanted to pursue maritime interests. In this fashion, Grotius's "freedom of the seas" doctrine became a widely accepted foundation of modern international law. Historically, a state's sovereignty stopped at the shoreline. The world's oceans remained open-access, "common pool" resources. "How can a country control the seas?" asked the ruler of Macassar in the early seventeenth century, when the Dutch were attempting to monopolize the spice trade: "God has made the earth and the sea, has divided the earth among mankind and given the sea in common. It is a thing unheard of that anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas."