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Favorite Baseball Novels

Rob Neyers's list of five favorite baseball novels.


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The Celebrant: A Novel
Eric Rolfe Greenberg Bison Books

The first two decades of the 20th century were a time of promise and innocence in America. Hardworking immigrants could achieve the American dream, and heroes were really heroic. Greenberg authentically chronicles the real-life saga of the first national baseball hero, Christy Mathewson, and the fictional story of a Jewish immigrant family of jewelers.
list Price: $17.95 our price: $9.74
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The Great American Novel
Philip Roth Henry Holt & Co

Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a home run sober. If you've never heard of them—or of the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history—it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.

In this ribald, richly imagined, and wickedly satiric novel, Roth turns baseball's status as national pastime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete ...
list Price: $35.00 our price: $196.15
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The Southpaw
Mark Harris Bison Books

This is a story about coming of age in America by way of the baseball diamond. Lefthander Henry Wiggen, six feet three, a hundred ninety-five pounds, and the greatest pitcher going, grows to manhood in a righthanded world. From his small-town beginnings to the top of the game, Henry finds out how hard it is to please his coach, his girl, and the sports page—and himself, too—all at once. Written in Henry's own words, this exuberant, funny novel follows his eccentric course from bush league to the World Series.

Also available in Bison Book editions are Bang the Drum Slowly, It ...
list Price: $14.95 our price: $6.50
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The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
Robert Coover Plume

A satirical fable with a rootless and helpless accountant as the protagonist. Alone in his apartment, he spends all his nights and weekends playing an intricate baseball game of his own invention. The author has won the William Faulkner Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.
list Price: $16.00 our price: $6.29
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You Know Me Al
Ring Lardner Touchstone

"You Know me Al" is a classic of baseball--the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's greatest 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.

Nostalgic in its view of pre-World War I America--a time before the "live" ball, a time filled with names ...

list Price: $16.95 our price: $6.00
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honorable mention
Man on Spikes
Eliot Asinof Southern Illinois University Press

Originally published in 1955, this is a novel about a baseball player who struggles through 16 years of personal crises and professional ordeals before finally appearing in a major-league game. In the preface to this edition, Asinof reveals the identity of the friend upon which the novel is based.
list Price: $75.00 our price from: $95.51
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honorable mention
Sometimes You See It Coming: A Novel
Kevin Baker Harper Perennial

John Barr is the kind of baseball player who isn't supposed to exist anymore. An all-around superstar, he makes his New York Mets team all but invincible. Yet Barr is a mystery, with no past, no friends, no women, and no interests outside of hitting a baseball. Not even Rapid Ricky Falls, a.k.a. "the Old Swizzlehead," his streetwise teammate, can get a handle on him. Neither can Ellie Jay, the sportswriter who wants to think she admires Barr's skill on the field but also might be in love with a man who isn't really there.

Barr leads the Mets to one championship after another. Then chaos ...

list Price: $14.99 our price: $2.99
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honorable mention
The Greatest Slump of All Time
David Carkeet Harpercollins
The Greatest Slump is one of the greatest baseball stories. A hapless team of talented misfits struggle with their lives and psychological problems as they make their way through a winning season. Professional baseball has never been funnier. A classic of sports "anti-psych". Carkeet writes better than almost anyone else in America, and in this novel he pins the favorite pass-time on the point of his pen and shakes it until we are all splattered in laughter.
list Price: $14.95 our price: $68.00
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honorable mention
The Seventh Babe
Jerome Charyn University Press of Mississippi
This was yet another flashy novel. The author is too concerned with showing how clever he is to be bothered with a plausible plot or believable characters. The central character in particular was totally unbelievable. As much as I wanted to like it, it grew dull and dissonant about half of the way through. The ending was totally absurd ( and not in a nice way).
list Price: $25.00 our price: $11.75
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honorable mention
The Brothers K
David James Duncan Dial Press Trade Paperback

Finally in trade paperback, complementing Bantam's new release of River Teeth and our consistently bestselling edition of The River Why, here is The Brothers K, a lyrical and lovely novel of family.
list Price: $17.00 our price: $9.11
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