Playing every angle for a shot at the big time, Chicagoans venture to area pool halls to perfect their games and navigate league play for a shot at the APA World Pool Championships in Las Vegas. In Going Rackless: Chicago’s Amateur Pool Players and the Quest for Glory in the Biggest Tournament in the World (3 Fields Books, 2025) Dylan Taylor-Lehman joins a lively cast of characters under the lights and inside a subculture as old as Chicago itself. Whether running the table or waiting their turn, everyone has a story to tell and opinions to share on position play, billiards’s unwritten code, and life itself. Taylor-Lehman follows four promising teams on a mission to reach Vegas before unwinding an electric account of what it takes to win the world’s premier amateur tournament—and what you take away when the balls aren’t sunk. Entertaining and immersive, Going Rackless puts readers tableside to watch a game everyone has played but few truly understand.

Dylan Taylor-Lehman is a journalist and writer and the author of Sealand: The True Story of the World’s Most Stubborn Micronation and Its Eccentric Royal Family and Dance of the Trustees: On the Astonishing Concerns of a Small Ohio Township.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network.

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