“It’s a tremendous pleasure to tour America with Carlo Rotella, whose essays take us from a Slovenian-Cleveland-style polka club in Chicago, to a ‘jazz fantasy camp’ in upstate New York, to the Las Vegas mall where Floyd Mayweather Jr. is getting a pedicure. Full of sharp dialogue, true to the ideals of craft and adventure, this essay collection reads like a great road novel.”

Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed

“Carlo Rotella shows us how much we’ve been missing in the years since he published his last book. In this collection of articles and essays about fencers, boxers, nightmares, Providence and Jack Vance—to name a few—he displays a remarkable talent for piercing observations and deftly-turned phrases. Yet within the disciplined fireworks of his style, true mastery is displayed by a narrator whose insight into human shortcomings is matched by his empathy for them. No matter where Rotella goes, from a fighter’s corner in Norfolk, Virginia to a seminar on Plato at New York University, he is immediately at home. Carlo Rotella is one of the most important non-fiction writers working in America today.”

Robert Anasi, author of The Gloves: A Boxing Chronicle and The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn

“Carlo Rotella’s breezily written evocations--of places like the Checkerboard Lounge or the Baby Doll Polka Club, of Linwood Taylor and the myth of the perfect bluesman, of Larry Holmes’s jump jab in the ring, and of the SciFi experience of reading Jack Vance in Chicago--merge into an autobiographical kaleidoscope of a formative neighborhood.”

Werner Sollors, Harvard University

“It’s fair to call Carlo Rotella a poet of urban life, alive to the freedom that cities offer us to pursue lives of our own devising, and of masculinity and the ways men lose and find themselves in their passions.”

National (UAE)

“Carlo Rotella is an old-fashioned journalist in the best sense of the term: he doesn’t just visit the people and places he writes about, he inhabits them.  His articles and essays are models of empathy and understanding.  And because he is a man who appreciates craft— the craft of boxers, fencers, musicians, and clowns—his own work always strikes the right celebratory note, the one that ends with just the slightest inflection of melancholy—which, unparadoxically, is what makes his work a pleasure to read.”

Arthur Krystal

"The strength of his new essay collection comes from the odd places he finds these headliners: on the suburban D.C.-area blues circuit, in Chicago’s polka clubs and at fantasy jazz camps in the Northeast. But like other greats of the nonfiction craft—Joan Didion, John Jeremiah Sullivan—Rotella’s own personality eventually comes through."

Time Out Chicago

“A present figure, but not a narcissistic one; Carlo Rotella is a rare kind of first-person journalist, one that understands that while the true subject of any article with an ‘I’ is the author, that his presence has altered the event and that his objectivity has been compromised, none of these things should excuse the navel-gazing so many of his peers succumb to. . . . the real meta-subject in Playing in Time is . . . how a great writer, by considering himself in relation to what he’s witnessing, has used compassion to show both the humor and the melancholy in all the resulting forms.  The work is superb throughout, but it’s Rotella’s presence, and his education as a writer told through encounters with others, that makes the work resonate far beyond its meticulous immediacy.”

Coffin Factory