Dad Had a Bad Day

“Arresting . . . Politanoff parlays his own experience as a former D1 tennis player into brisk and technical descriptions of the sport . . . there’s plenty here to enjoy.”
—Publishers Weekly

“An excellent tennis book that embodies the agony of the sport itself. Obsessive, competitive, psychologically damaged, the manic energy that runs through Ashton Politanoff’s novel is a high-wire act sustained by his prickly sentences and imagination for interior madness. Dad Had a Bad Day is deranged and also a really good time.”
—Kevin Nguyen, author of My Documents

“Call it tennis court noir. Politanoff is one of my favorite writers working today, and he applies maximum spin to every sentence of this nervy, funny, heartbreaking novel. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go practice my serve.”
—Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

“One dark thing I love about sports: the cost of goodness is often some other badness. Dad Had a Bad Day is perhaps the best novel I’ve ever read on that theme. At turns hilarious, acrid, haunted, and sweet—yet none of those notes landed where I expected. This novel wrong-footed me. It left me stumbling on the hard court, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”
—Giri Nathan, author of Changeover

“This book is a triumph. Dripping in masculinity and self pity, Ned, college tennis star of yore, is thrillingly unhinged and now mooching off his hard-working, capable, professionally employed wife while he spirals in and out of old beefs and a renewed pursuit of on-court glory. Impeccably, propulsively, and hilariously rendered, Politanoff writes about tennis like Barry Hannah wrote about alcohol–something swift, addictive, fun, life-giving and also totally filthy. I gulped this book whole in a single sitting. Nobody writes like Ashton Politanoff.”
—Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“Dad Had a Bad Day is a funny, moving, often disturbing portrait of men—alone and in groups, as sons and fathers—filled with strange detail, bold swerves, and the idiosyncratic language of sport.”
—Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch