The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

At some point in my late youth my obsessions turned from the made-up baseball games I played with my friends to the made-up stories that get called "fiction." This book, as much as anything, was the hinge. A very grown-up story about a lonely man playing a kid's game—a self-invented dice game that's the source of an entire imagined universe—it has an obvious parallel to the God-playing of the novelist, but the story is told with such tender, haunting exactitude that just now, looking back on the scene when Henry rolls the fateful three ones, my throat catches just as it did the first time I read it over thirty years ago.