Classic Baseball

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST “A masterpiece” (The Wall Street Journal) of a novel by the era-defining author of The Bonfire of the Vanities—now a Netflix original limited series from David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) starring Jeff Daniels, Lucy Liu, and...

This is a story about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a story by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is the story about what happened to the team when their glory days were behind them.

The companion to Ken Burns’s magnificent PBS television series—updated and expanded to coincide with the broadcast of a new, two-part Tenth Inning directed with Lynn Novick. The authors of the acclaimed and bestselling The Civil War, Jazz, and The War turn to another uniquely American...

Winner of the Irish Book of the Year * Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction * Shortlisted for the Nero Novel of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community...

The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first - and some would say still the best - novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material - the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era - and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work.

Baseball explores the history of organized baseball during the mid-twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures whose stories figure prominently in baseball's past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness.

This baseball classic that Ernest Hemingway called "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived" includes a foreword from Jane Leavy and never-before-seen content from the Plimpton archives. The first of Plimpton's remarkable forays into participatory journalism, Out of My League chronicles...

Best-selling author George Vecsey is an esteemed and award-winning sports journalist for the New York Times. In Baseball, he recounts the history of America's national pastime. Baseball has been around in various forms for thousands of years, but only within the last 200 years has it become an American institution. Growing from a sport played in open fields and big-city streets, baseball has seen its share of innovators and detractors, heroes and villains.

Mr. Boorschmidt's Stupendous and Unexcelled Circus is back in town. This time one of its attractions is really out of this world. In the big ring are six Martians and their flying saucer! But Boorschmidt doesn't stop there. He wants something even more spectacular to offer the audience, so he asks Freddy for help. Freddy knows what to do. He organizes an amazing baseball team.

Sisters? Forever. Friends? NEVER. Who knew a reunion weekend could be so deadly? Meet the sorority sisters of Theta Gamma Mu: Roxy Callahan Gentry, the ruthless former sorority president and current hostess who has painstakingly choreographed every detail of this weekend—even matching the...

Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the rewards it promises. Film, America's other national pastime, which magnifies and mythologizes all it touches, has long been the ideal medium to canonize this aspirational idea.

In Where You Once Belonged, the bestselling and award-winning novelist of Eventide, Kent Haruf tells of a small-town hero who is dealt an enviable hand--and cheats with all of the cards. Deftly plotted, defiantly honest, Where You Once Belonged sings the song of a wounded prairie community in...

A succinct history of baseball, newly revised and updated. In this third edition of his lively history of America's game, widely recognized as the best of its kind, Benjamin G. Rader expands his scope, covering record crowds and record income, construction of new ballparks, a change in the strike zone, a surge in recruiting Japanese players, and an emerging cadre of explosive long-ball hitters. The book is published by The University of Illinois Press.

To this irresistible debut collection of short stories, Richard Russo brings the same bittersweet wit, deep knowledge of human nature, and spellbinding narrative gifts that distinguish his best-selling novels. His themes are the imperfect bargains of marriage; the discoveries and...

Ever wonder why we refer to three so often? The Big Three. “Third time’s a charm.” “Bad news comes in threes.” Threes represent curious patterns in many cultures. Sometimes those patterns of threes are obvious and tangible. Consider the modern traffic signal. Green, yellow and red lenses, each with a different meaning to motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians, fire in a predictable and never-changing order to signal proceed, slow down and stop when lighted in sequence. Sometimes those patterns are intangible. Such as three laws. Three rules of thumb. Three principles. Three classes...

From the author of the classic coming-of-age memoir Fresh off the Boat, tragicomic autofiction about how one very messed up and haunted manchild finds love in spite of himself. Hubie lives an exciting life. He hosts a traveling food show, produces it with his two best friends, and tastes the...

You Know Me, Al is a classic of baseball, the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's great characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his not-quite-anonymous friend Al, Lardner maintains a balance between the funny and the moving, the pathetic and the glorious.

An examination of how curriculum choices can perpetuate White supremacy, and radical strategies for how schools and teacher education programs can disrupt and transform racism in education When racist curriculum “goes viral” on social media, it is typically dismissed as an isolated incident...

The Wizard of Oz, manager of the Marvels baseball team, wants desperately to play against the Serpents, led by Evillene, their manager, who is also known as the Wicked Witch of the West. But these two teams live on opposite sides of the Dimensional Gates, and have never met. Every day the Wizard pleads to the Great Wind, the tornado that controls the Gate, and begs the Wind to allow this to happen. Until finally the two teams, and the two most powerful entities on the planet, get to meet. Learn what happens when Dorothy from Kansas, along with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion play the ...

A "marvelous" (Sports Illustrated) portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston and the Spanish flu: baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard law student Charles Whittlesey. In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets...