No Friday Night Lights

No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America is a meditation on the pain and emotional challenge of losing and how it preys on the the young mind of a high school athlete. The book follows a band of predominantly Native-American high school football players as they face the prospect of another winless season. Hailing from a tiny border town on the Nevada-Oregon border, the McDermitt Bulldogs rarely (if ever) win. They know the bitter taste of wearing hand-me-down uniforms and last season’s mouth guards. But they will not define themselves as losers. Nor will their coaches (one Native American, the other White, both standout former athletes), nor will the nearby Paiute-Shoshone reservation that keeps rooting them on.

But the book is about more than just football.

No Friday Night Lights takes readers on the ground to explore the hidden culture of America’s so-called flyover country, offering an intimate look at a dying western town and showing how a failed economy unravels a once tightly-knit social thread, driving away families, robbing the land of its people, forcing the local high school football team to scramble even to round up enough players to assemble a team, let alone learn how to win amid a landscape that for generations has known only losing.

The lessons here are universal. In life, for most of us, whether we live in the city or a small town like McDermitt, winning is a brief shimmering moment. Losing is what happens the rest of the time. This book explores how winning teaches us far less than losing and how the best life insights come from the loser’s locker room.

It’s the real deal.

Author John M. Glionna is an award-winning journalist who currently works as a freelance writer, dividing his time between Las Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Outside, California Sunday Magazine, and other publications.

He will be joined in conversation by award-winning photojournalist Randi Lynn Beach, whose work appears in No Friday Night Lights. Her photography has also been featured in publications including Rolling Stone, Washington Post, People and The New York Times.

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