Praise for Believeniks!
“This is a book about baseball in the way that Moby-Dick is a book about whaling; for Felt and Conklin, balls and strikes are quantifiers of hope and heartbreak. They understand what we all have to learn: that to strike out on a 3-2 count after fouling off half a dozen pitches is a good at-bat.” —David Gates, author of Jernigan
“If the writers sound in these pages like they have almost no hope, that’s because they don’t. They have only determination and unrealistic longing. Loving the Mets is like loving Esperanto or Betamax. It’s just kind of a bad idea. That’s what makes this book so tragicomic, so operatic, so human.” —Rick Moody, author of The Diviners
“It’s said that losing builds character, but it’s obvious that Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin were characters well before the ill-starred ’05 season. In a genre that’s often bloodless, they bare maybe too much of their hearts as the Amazins stumble down the stretch. Believeniks! is a funny, funky chronicle of their shared leap of faith into the abyss.”
—Stewart O’Nan, coauthor of Faithful
“John Cheever once said that all literary men are Red Sox fans; here to put the lie to that are Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin, whose Believeniks! is the best book of its kind since Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s Faithful. The Mets may only have warning-track power, but Felt and Conklin send Believeniks! screaming out of the yard.”
—Mark Winegardner, author of Crooked River Burning
“Like a seeing-eye single between short and third with a speedy runner dashing for the dish, Believeniks! scores just when you think the game should have been over. In that sense, it is archetypically, quintessentially Mets. One might say it is a Queens avatar.”
—Stephen King, coauthor of Faithful
“We may or may not be what we eat; but we are who we support, and Ivan Felt and Harris Cronklin are the New York Mets of literature. I am English, and was therefore unable to follow the Mets’ fortunes in 2005 with as much attention as I’d have liked. But I am sure Believeniks! is the tribute and testament that this venerable New York institution deserved.” —Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch
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