Game, set texts and match: smashing reads for Wimbledon

From David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to Stephen Fry’s The Stars’ Tennis Balls – a celebration of tennis in literature

Wimbledon begins today and the UK has begun its annual convulsion of love for tennis. The sport has a rich literary heritage, so which books should you seek out when rain stops play?

Many writers enjoy watching and playing tennis, including Geoff Dyer, Lionel Shriver and AS Byatt, who has been known to write her novels with Wimbledon on in the background. Both Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace played tennis enthusiastically and have included the game in their fiction and essays. Memorably, Amis transplants the effete grass-court match-ups traditional in English fiction to the more appropriate 1980s setting of a Manhattan skyscraper for John Self’s drubbing by Fielding Goodney in Money. (The sport crops up, too, in The Rachel Papers and The Information.)

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