Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE ® Players » (Reprint)

Stefan Fatsis is a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a regular contributor to NPR's All Things Considered. His first book, Wild and Outside, is about minor-league baseball in the Midwest.

Scrabble may be truly called America's game. But for every group of "living-room players" there is someone who is "at one with the board." In Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis introduces readers to those few, exploring the underground world of colorful characters for which the Scrabble game is life-playing competitively in tournaments across the country. It is also the story of how the Scrabble game was invented by an unemployed architect during the Great Depression and how it has grown into the hugely successful, challenging, and beloved game it is today. Along the way, Fatsis chronicles his own obsession with the game and his development as a player from novice to expert. More than a book about hardcore Scrabble players, Word Freak is also an examination of notions of brilliance, memory, language, competition, and the mind that celebrates the uncanny creative powers in us all.

"Fatsis . . . writes with affectionate zeal about the game and the fraternity of brilliant, lonely, and otherwise dysfunctional oddballs it attracts." (The New York Times)

"Word Freak has an impassioned subtitle, and it lives up to every word." (People)

Will Shortz

An engrossing, inside look at the strange and rarefied world of competitive Scrabble. It's a pleasure to experience vicariously a level of play that I'll never achieve!