If I Never Get Back
Time travel meets baseball in this "grand adventure" about a modern-day reporter who witnesses the birth of America's favorite pastime (The Washington Times) Contemporary reporter Sam Fowler is stuck in a dull job and a failing marriage when he is suddenly transported back to the summer of 1869. After a wrenching period of adjustment, he feels rejuvenated by his involvement with the nation's first pro baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. But American sports isn't the only thing to undergo a major transformation--Sam himself starts to change as he faces life-threatening 19th-century challenges on and off the baseball diamond. With the support of his fellow ballplayers and the lovely Caitlin O'Neill, will he regain the sense of family he desperately needs? Darryl Brock masterfully evokes post-Civil War America--its smoky cities and transcontinental railroad, its dance halls and parlour houses, its financial booms and busts. Equally appealing to sports fans and anyone who appreciates a well-told story, If I Never Get Back is a literary home run that "grabs you from line one on page one and never lets go" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Back Porch Swing
Lance Stoler has some tough decisions to make. He's a highly recruited high school senior from a small town in eastern Kentucky. But playing basket ball isn't the only thing on Lance's mind. There's the girl he meets on a recruiting trip to Kansas?the basketball buddy who may have stepped over the line with recruiting rules, the coach who has questionable reputation and the pressure from family to sign with his parent's alma Mater. Family traditions and relationships are at stake. If you?ve ever found yourself caught between a rock and a hard place, if you enjoy the drama of high school sports, if you relate to the underdog, route for the little guy, you will love Back Porch Swing. In the spirit of Hoosiers and Chariots of Fire, Back Porch Swing delivers a heartwarming and enjoyable read where family values, character and integrity are tested.
Castro’s Curveball
Recently widowed and now retired, Billy Bryan is "coming to the end of many things." Then a long-forgotten scrapbook stirs memories of a distant past--and beckons him and his grown daughter on a reluctant journey to relive his role in history. In 1947 Bryan was playing winter ball in Cuba, his future as uncertain as the island country's. Then one fateful night Bryan witnessed a young student radical named Fidel unleash an amazing curveball. So begins Bryan's tug-of-war with destiny.
The Year The Yankees Lost The Pennant
Decades before Field of Dreams there was The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the classic baseball fable that became the hit movie and musical Damn Yankees. Now a new generation is ready to discover this delightful book, restored to its original title, with a new introduction by baseball writer Bill James. Baseball lovers everywhere can identify with Joe Boyd, a die-hard Washington Senators fan who puts his soul in hock to help them wrest the pennant away from the hated, all-conquering Yankees. Transformed by the sulfurous Mr. Applegate's satanic magic into twenty-two-year-old phenom Joe Hardy, he leads the hapless Senators in a torrid late-season pursuit of the men in pinstripes. Joe has until September 21st before the deal becomes final--and eternal. With the luscious temptress Lola to distract him, he'll have a hell of a time wriggling out of the bargain...
Everybody’s All-American
Gavin Grey is everyone's All-American. A star running back at the University of North Carolina in the late 1950s, he graces the covers of Time and LIFE magazines and appears on the "Ed Sullivan Show." Everyone wants a piece of him or to be around him to bask in his glory, including his nephew Donny, who narrates the story and is Gavin's only real confidant.After college, Gavin goes on to the NFL where he has a solid career. As his playing days wind down and the cheering stops, however, he finds the adjustment to life as an ex-athlete difficult to accept. His wife "Babs" goes off to work, becomes the primary breadwinner for the family while Gavin continues to trade on his memories of old times, when he was everybody's All-American.
Remembering Dud Dean
A fictional Maine guide who won many friends and admirers through the pages of Field & Stream magazine in the 1920s and '30s, Dud Dean is very much a product of his creator. Arthur Macdougall was an avid outdoorsman and a minister in Bingham, Maine, a tiny town perched on the reaches of the mighty Kennebec River. The tales in this book were compiled by Macdougall's son, Walter.
Bang the Drum Slowly
Henry Wiggen, hero of The Southpaw and the best-known fictional baseball player in America, is back again, throwing a baseball "with his arm and his brain and his memory and his bluff for the sake of his pocket and his family." More than a novel about baseball, Bang the Drum Slowly is about the friendship and the lives of a group of men as they each learn that a teammate is dying of cancer. Bang the Drum Slowly was chosen as one of the top one hundred sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated and appears on numerous other lists of best baseball fiction. In the introduction to this new Bison Books edition Mark Harris discusses the making of the classic 1973 film starring Robert DeNiro, based on his screen adaptation of the book. Also available in Bison Books editions are The Southpaw, It Looked Like For Ever.
Sometimes You See It Coming
Based in part on the life of baseball legend Ty Cobb, this book belongs in the pantheon of great baseball novels.John Barr is the kind of player who isn't supposed to exist anymore. An all-around superstar, he plays the game with a single-minded ferocity that makes his New York Mets team all but invincible. Yet Barr himself is a mystery with no past, no friends, no women, and no interests outside hitting a baseball as hard and as far as he can. Not even Ellie Jay, the jaded sportswriter who can out-think, out-drink, and out-write any man in the press box. She wants to think she admires Barr's skill on a ballfield, but suspects she might be in love with a man who isn't really there. Barr leads the Mets to one championship after another. Then chaos arrives in the person of new manager Charli Stanzi, well-known psychopath. Under Stanzi's tutelage, the team simply falls apart. Then Barr himself inexplicably starts to unravel. For the first time in his life, his formidable skills fail him, and only Ellie Jay and another can help - if he will let them. Hanging in the balance are his sanity, the World Series, and true love.
The Rider
The instant cult classic about biking, road racing, and the bicyclists who love their sport. Originally published in Holland in 1978, The Rider went on to sell more than 100,000 copies. Brilliantly conceived and written at a break-neck pace, it is a loving, imaginative, and, above all, passionate tribute to the art of bicycle road racing. Tim Krabb矇 begins this story at the very start of the Tour de Mont Aigoual, ready to race his rivals through the mountains of Central France. Over the course of the 150 pages that follows, Krabb矇 takes his bike 150 kilometers, and pulls his readers into the life of the sport he loves. The Rider is beloved as a bicycle odyssey, a literary masterpiece, and the ultimate book for bike lovers as well as the arm-chair sports enthusiast.
You Know Me Al
In the early decades of the twentieth century, newspaperman and humorist Ring Lardner (1885-1933) made America laugh with his hilarious depictions of odd characters in the sporting world, Tin Pan Alley, and Hollywood. His first great success was You Know Me Al, a fictional series of letters from a popular baseball hero to his friend, slyly revealing the letter writer as a crude, conceited, semiliterate, self-deceiving boob.The letters, created while Lardner was writing a sports column for The Chicago Tribune, first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and were later published in book form in 1918. You Know Me Al reveals Lardner as a satirical master at the peak of his form: a fine albeit misanthropic storyteller with a superb feel for the niceties of characters and speech and a sure instinct for provoking laughter.
It Looked Like for Ever
Henry Wiggen, the bedraggled six-foot-three, 195-pound, left-handed pitcher for the New York Mammoths, returns to narrate another novel in his inimitable manner. Fans who loved him in Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw, and A Ticket for a Seamstitch (all Bison Books) will cheer his comeback. Wiggen is now thirty-nine, a fading veteran with a floating fastball, a finicky prostate, and other intimations of mortality. Released from the Mammoths after nineteen years, the twenty-seventh winningest pitcher in baseball history (tied at 247 victories with Joseph J. "Iron Man" McGinnity and John Powell), Wiggen is not ready to hang up his glove. What impels Henry to pitch against Pate, to trek to California and as far as Japan? He still has a few seasons, a few innings left anyway. Is he principled or possessed? You'll have to decide for yourself as author Mark Harris plays out Wiggen's midlife crisis on familiar American turf: the baseball diamond.
