Passion Play: Love, Hope and Heartbreak at the Footy

Order Passion Play paperback @ $29.95
Matthew Klugman

Passion_Play Author: Matthew Klugman
ISBN: 9780980517965
Imprint: Hunter
RRP: 29.95 (inc. GST)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 160
Pub. Date: 2009-09


Description

There’s something about Australian Rules football that drives people towards madness.

Something that produces great pain and joy and an insatiable hunger for more.

Passion Play journeys into the world of footy mania and the love and suffering at its heart. Drawing on the experiences of a diverse set of fans who’ve told their stories in interviews, books, articles, and on footy websites and blogs it follows the annual quest for the premiership in all its horror and glory.

Matthew Klugman brings footy’s seasonal rhythm of love, hope, and heartbreak to life. The hope and nerves of the pre-season, the stress of matches, the sweetness of victory and the dull ache of defeat.Then come the finals with their agonising tension and tragic losses. The ecstasy of the premiership promises to make all the pain and suffering worthwhile but there can be a danger, too, in getting your heart’s desire.

Tales of ordinary football madness sit alongside insights from the worlds of religion and psychology. Love and hate, hope and anxiety, ecstasy and agony and those moments of unbearable tension where it seems, for an instant, that nothing else matters.


About the Author

Matthew Klugman is the author of the book Blood Matters and has written about sport, music, and medicine for Eureka Street and Meanjin. His work on the passions of footy fans has featured on Australian radio, television, and newspapers. He lives in Melbourne where he lectures in sports studies at Victoria University and is a fellow of the Centre for Ageing, Rehabilitation, Exercise and Sports Science.


  • About Hunter Publishers

    We’re an independent Australian publisher based in Melbourne. We publish a unique blend of fiction, non-fiction and poetry and specialise in writing that is original and engaged — much of it written by young Australian writers you’ve never heard of, but should have.

  • Twitter

    Posting tweet...

  • Latest News

  • New Releases

    • The Norseman's Song
    • Splints to Silk
    • Torpedo_GH_Cover
    • The_Convalescent

  • CurrentTitles

    Displaying 1–5 of 5
    • Beneath Our ArmourBOA

      Beneath Our Armour is unique. This sequence of portrait poems covers vast tracts of history, geography, and personae in a way that is at once intimate and epic.

    • Big Girl NowBGN

      Set in contemporary India, Big Girl Now follows the story of a young woman who moves from a small hill town to Bangalore. This is one of the first Indian novels to explore the situation of a young girl in a big city and to do so in a way that balances cynicism with wit, warmth with uncertainty, existential doubts with the pulls of the everyday world.

    • Father’s DayFather's Day

      Tony Birch’s first collection of stories, Shadowboxing, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards in 2006 and was voted top five in a State Library of Victoria poll of readers’ all-time favorite books set in Victoria.

    • How a Moth Becomes a BoatHow-Moth-Becomes-Boat

      A father teaches his daughter how to break whiskey bottles. A woman looks for an old lover in a satellite photograph. A man finds the voice of his dead wife on an unlabelled cassette tape. A blind girl dreams about the taste of the moon.

    • Lunatic In My HeadLIMH_cover

      Set against the backdrop of a small Indian hill town called Shillong, this title is a beautiful lyrical novel about three lives in limbo. A compelling debut by a major new talent, will appeal to readers of Arundhati Roy.