"Baseball – what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around." Chad Harbach's debut novel shares its title with a guide to playing baseball, which includes meditative observations on the art of life itself. It's a
1. Remarkable wrangling with world-changing matters: racism. (Most of what I say below is about this: but there are other fine reasons too.) 2. Southern US setting (Many readers know and love Southern fiction, but this isn't Mississippi: it's Arkansas. That's refreshing. Even if Chess does think it's boring!) "I
David Bezmozgis' The Free World HarperCollins, 2011 The Krasnansky family is making their way out of Soviet Russia, travelling to Rome. Samuil, the patriarch, is annoyed by the tour guide's suggestion that the history of Western civilization could be plotted along the road that the bus is travelling. "Their history:
Michael Christie's The Beggar's Garden Harper-Collins, 2011 Although the title for Michael Christie's story collection is drawn from the final story, it might well have been pulled from the second story's title, "Discard". It's at the heart of this debut collection: that which has been left behind, tossed out, put
Alexi Zentner's Touch Knopf, 2011 It seems like stating the obvious, but Touch is all about storytelling. Sure, all novels are fiction. They all contain stories. But they aren't all about storytelling. However, Alexi Zentner's novel is just that. "I felt like I knew him already. I'd heard so many
