Emily Nemens’s Home Run*

Our second author for our Hitting Home panel is Emily Nemens. Emily’s debut novel, The Cactus League, is an explosive, character-driven odyssey through the world of baseball. On its release it was showered with praise, including this from the Los Angeles Times: “[Nemens} demonstrates deep knowledge not only of baseball but also of American desperation . . . Nemens makes us care about even the worst of [her characters], a neat trick of unsentimental empathy and a testament to the power of careful, almost loving, observation . . . With her sharp eye for the details of unremarkable lives, Nemens at times reminds one of Joan Didion, and her Southwestern dreamers.”

Joan Didion on baseball? Sign us up.

* You guys, we’re trying really hard to avoid all the baseball cliches, but sometimes we can’t resist.

Emily Nemens’s debut novel, The Cactus League was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and was named one of the best books of the year by NPR and Lit Hub. Emily spent a decade editing literary quarterlies, including The Paris Review, which won the American Society of Magazine Editors' Award for Fiction under her tenure, and The Southern Review. She lives in New York and is working on her second novel.