Are you following the winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia? Behind the amazing athletic feats and medal news are many dramatic stories about the athletes themselves. No athlete gets to Olympic competition without human drama. Sports set the stage for great stories.

When you think of sports literature, you might first think of straightforward factual books. But sports literature offers much more, whether nonfiction or fiction. It finds its way into memoirs such as Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Jake LaMotta’s Raging Bull. It becomes the catalyst in such novels as Don DeLillo’s Underworld and John Grisham’s Calico Joe. It can be a recurring theme for authors such as Ernest Hemingway, describing bullfighting in the nonfiction Death in the Afternoon and his novel The Sun Also Rises. So many great sports stories, some already mentioned here, have been successfully adapted to movies. Other examples include Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend and Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side.

What elevates all great literature is found in great sports literature: the ability to take the reader somewhere new, to inform, entertain and enlighten. In sports literature, you will find agony and ecstasy, trials and triumphs, pride and humility, loneliness and camaraderie, friends and combatants, heroes and villains, honesty and corruption, sacrifice and greed, humor and pathos. Sport stories often transcend the sport itself, revealing our humanity in all its exquisite complexity. As sports have the power to transform athletes, sports literature has the power to transform readers.