The Prospects - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor KT Hoffman is originally from Beaverton, Oregon and currently lives in Brooklyn. He received his bachelor’s degree in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University. If he isn’t writing about trans hope and gay kissing, he’s probably white-knuckling his way through the ninth inning of a Seattle Mariners game. The Prospects is his debut novel. Klappentext "Gene Ionescu, a gay trans man in his third year in the minors with the Beaverton Beavers, is a solid shortstop, but he's no one's idea of a major league prospect. He's just happy to be here, though, getting underpaid six months of the year to play the sport he's loved since childhood. ... But his plans go awry when Luis Estrada--Gene's rival since their college days--gets traded to his team--and promptly takes Gene's position. After Gene's coach forces him over to second base, he and Luis can't manage a civil conversation off the field or a competent play on it--a major issue for the team since their two positions make up the critical keystone combination on the infield. But when Gene finds Luis having a panic attack in their shared hotel room, he offers to start extra practices together"-- Leseprobe 1 April Current record: 0–0 Gene Ionescu has always loved every detail of baseball, but none quite so much as its near-complete indifference to the body. In few other sports can a five-foot, two-inch sprinter appear on the same roster as a six-foot, five-inch pitcher. Size—muscle, height, maybe a few extra inches of reach or long running legs—helps. But baseball also rewards the patient, the crafty, and, perhaps most of all, the optimistic. It’s that hope, more than anything else, that makes Gene a good baseball player. He plays baseball because he is an optimist; he is an optimist because he has to be. On April first, four days before a new season starts, in the most optimistic moment of the most optimistic sport, when every last thing feels possible, Gene sits on the floor of his apartment, wrestling with an Allen wrench. Vince finds him like that, hunched over and cursing. “You’ve had five months of offseason to do this. Why the sudden burst of productivity?” “Well, I meant to do it in November, but my brain finally decided to recognize a deadline today, and I’m trying to make the most of it,” Gene says. He gestures to the bookshelf he’s been working on for the last hour. “Except I can’t figure out why this screw doesn’t fit. What if I just throw the whole thing away and embrace minimalism?” Vince drops onto Gene’s couch, picks up the IKEA instruction manual, and sets his feet on the dented, partially unpacked cardboard box Gene uses as an ottoman. A moment later, he jangles the bag of hardware in Gene’s direction. “Because you’re using the wrong screws. You need the short ones, and a Phillips-head,” he says. Probably not the kind of assistance IKEA envisioned when its cartoon directions told Gene not to assemble heavy furniture alone, but it works. Last spring, when he was assigned to start the season with the Beaverton Beavers—the Triple-A minor league team for the Portland Lumberjacks—an unfamiliar number texted him less than an hour after the rosters were announced. This is Vince Altman. I play for Beaverton. Would love to have you over for coffee, get to know you! “Love” had actually been a heart emoji, but what endeared Vince to Gene from the start, what surprised and impressed him, was the introduction. As if any self-respecting baseball player could fail to recognize the name of Portland’s former golden boy. A day later, the Vince Altman told Gene over coffee in his kitchen that he had a husband—with whom he lived and about whom the entire team, and very nearly no one else, knew. He became the first, and thus far only, queer man currently in baseball to welcome Gene to their small, often lonely clu...

Product details

• Authors: KT Hoffman
• Publisher: Dial Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 09.04.2024
• EAN: 9780593596869
• ISBN: 978-0-593-59686-9
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 202 mm x 20 mm
• Series: Dial Delights
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature