When adventure/extreme sports achieved liftoff in the mid-1970s, John Long stories provided a kind of Technicolor diary of what it was like to shoot rapids with Punan tribesmen in Borneo, and scale the great granite monoliths in Yosemite. But most of all, Long's award-winning stories brought into focus the DNA of the athlete's inner experience. How the characters sounded and felt and lived – and sometimes died. In turn literary, noir, absurd, and...