Jesse Katz

Start: November 19, 2009 - 7:00pm

Join us for an evening with former Houstonian and two-time Pulitzer winner Jesse Katz, whose new book, The Opposite Field, is dropping jaws everywhere. Learn more at byjessekatz.com.

“You need two things to make a fine, fine book: a story and a teller. The Opposite Field brings them together, like young love. It's a story about fathers and sons, and good love and failed love, and baseball. If that isn't by God a book I don't know what is....But the best thing about this book is the teller. This guy can flat-out write.”
—Rick Bragg, author the New York Times bestseller All Over but the Shoutin’

"A love letter from a father to his son, The Opposite Field is also a hymn to baseball, the new Los Angeles, the joy and pain of modern parenting as well as one man's journey into wisdom and clarity, and Jesse Katz shapes this material in such a way that he makes it as dramatic as a movie. I never would have thought a book about a Little League team could be this compelling, or that so much could be at stake, or that La Loma could become--and it does in Katz's buoyant prose--the stuff of legend."
—Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Lunar Park

Here is one of the most remarkable, ambitious, and utterly original memoirs of this generation, a story of the losing and finding of self, of sex and love and fatherhood and the joy of language, of death and failure and heartbreak, of Los Angeles and Portland and Nicaragua and Mexico, and the shifting sands of place and meaning that can make up a culture, or a community, or a home.

Faced with the collapse of his son’s Little League program–consisting mostly of Latino kids in the largely Asian suburb of Monterey Park, California–Jesse Katz finds himself thrust into the role of baseball commissioner for La Loma Park. Under its lights the yearnings and conflicts of a complex immigrant community are played out amid surprising moments of grace. Each day–and night–becomes a test of Jesse’s judgment and adaptability, and of his capacity to make this peculiar pocket of L.A.’s Eastside his home.

While Jesse soothes egos, brokers disputes, chases down delinquent coaches and missing equipment, and applies popsicles to bruises, he forms unlikely alliances, commits unanticipated errors, and receives the gift of unexpected wisdom. But there’s no less drama in Jesse’s complicated personal life as he grapples with a stepson who seems destined for trouble, comforts his mother (a legendary Oregon politician) when she’s stricken with cancer, and receives hard lessons in finding–and holding on to–the love of a good woman.

Through it all, Jesse’s emotional mainstay is his beloved son, Max, who quietly bests his father’s brightest hopes. Over nine springs and summers with Max at La Loma, Jesse learns nothing less than what it takes to be a father, a son, a husband, a coach, and, ultimately, a man.

This is an epic book, a funny book, a sexy book, a rapturously evocative and achingly poignant book. Above all it is true, in that it happened, but also in a way that transcends mere facts and cuts to the quick of what it means to be alive.

Jesse Katz is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a former staffer at the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine. From 1994 to 1998, he was the Houston bureau chief for the LA Times and wrote dozens of stories about Texas arts and politics and vices, including the murder of Tejano star Selena, the controversy over novelist Sandra Cisneros's purple house, and the record number of executions on death row. He has also written for Texas Monthly and lived in Houston's Willowbend neighborhood. He now lives with his son, Max, in Monterey Park, California.