Raise your sticks: Don DeLillo’s long-out-of-print, pseudonymous 1980 hockey romp will return to stores this fall.
Scribner will issue a new edition of the racy novel, Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever To Play in the National Hockey League, which DeLillo published under the pen name Cleo Birdwell, the New York Times reports. The reissue follows recent attention on the book sparked by the popularity of the HBO Max hockey romance Heated Rivalry, based on Rachel Reid’s 2019 book of the same name.
DeLillo, whose critically acclaimed novels include White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997), long disavowed and declined to republish the book, even excluding it from his bibliography, the Times reports. After decades of denial, DeLillo finally seemed to acknowledge his connection to the book in 2020, when he responded to New York Times Magazine reporter David Marchese’s question about it as follows: “Oh god. How do you remember that?”
“He was so against republishing,” DeLillo’s literary agent, Robin Straus, told the TImes. “Lots of people have asked, and he would always say no.”
The author’s change of heart came after the Times ran a piece by Alexandra Alter in January, which prompted his wife to read—and apparently loudly enjoy—the book, Alter reports in a story published this week with the subhead, “You’re welcome.”
“He said, what the hell, why not,” DeLillo’s editor, Nan Graham, told Alter.
Scribner calls the book, which follows Cleo’s adventures during her first season with the New York Rangers—“proving her mettle on the rink but also finding fun, adventure, and a lot of sex along the way”—a “comic masterpiece” and a “cult treasure.”
In a 1980 review of the book, Kirkus, apparently unaware of DeLillo’s authorship, was less impressed: “There have certainly been enough athlete memoirs in recent years to fuel a genuine send-up of the genre—but this overextended put-on doesn't even try for parody, settling instead for the most predictable sort of effortfully breezy satire/sex-farce,” we said in a review.
Amazons will be reissued on Nov. 17.
Amy Reiter is a writer in Brooklyn.
