Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life

Kyle Beachy published an essay in 2012 about skate culture, exploring how Nike's corporate strategy successfully gutted the independent skate shoe market. He has since established himself as a skate culture's freshest, most illuminating, and controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime. Beachy offers a deep exploration of skateboarding, offering a rich account of a hobby and a collection of the lessons it has taught him.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 11 November 2021
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

In January 2012, creative writing professor and novelist Kyle Beachy released one of his earliest works on skate culture, an in-depth examination of how Nike's corporate strategy effectively decimated the once-dominant independent skate shoe market. Since then, Beachy has solidified his position as skate culture's most fresh, enlightening, and occasionally divisive voice, writing openly about the increasingly popular and rapidly evolving pastime he first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood.

What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of forty, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion cemented in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married?

Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime-often overlooked, regularly maligned-whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths. THE MOST FUN THING is both a rich account of a hobby and a collection of the lessons skateboarding has taught Beachy-and what it continues to teach him as he struggles to find space for it as an adult, a professor, and a husband.

Weight: 406g
Dimension: 143 x 214 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781538754115