This image is the cover for the book Sporting Club

Sporting Club

When James Quinn and Vernor Stanton reunite at the Centennial Club, the scene of many a carefree childhood summer, Stanton marks the occasion by shooting his friend in the heart. The good news is that the bullet is made of wax. The bad news is that the Mephistophelian Stanton wants Quinn to help him wreak havoc upon this genteel enclave of weekend sportsmen: "May I predict that this is not going to be the usual boring, phlegmatic summer?"

In this hilarious novel, Thomas McGuane launches a renegade aristocrat and a mild-mannered fly-fisherman onto a collision course with each other and with the overbred scions of Michigan's robber barony. Escalating from practical jokes to guerrilla warfare, and from screwball comedy to mayhem worth of today's headlines, The Sporting Club is a foray into the sclerotic heart of American machismo.

Thomas McGuane

Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including The Bushwacked Piano, which won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Ninety-two in the Shade, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Panama; Nobody's Angel; Something to Be Desired; Keep the Change; and Nothing But Blue Skies. He has also written To Skin a Cat, a collection of short stories; and An Outside Chance, a collection of essays on sports. His books have been published in ten languages. He was born in Michigan and educated at Michigan State University, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale School of Drama and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. An ardent conservationist, he is a director of American Rivers and of the Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute. He lives with his family in McLeod, Montana.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux