Download Free Batting Against Castro Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Batting Against Castro and write the review.

The story, Reach for the Sky, is on the life of a worker in a home for abandoned dogs, while in Who We Are, What We're Doing, a fighter pilot considers pulling eight G's, "the real thing, the difference between thinking about kissing and kissing."
Skillfully edited by John McNally, Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories collects nineteen contemporary baseball short stories from a successful mix of well-established writers, lesser-knowns, and a few up-and-comers. These stories are characterized by the same dramatic elements that draw people to the sport itself--the mythologizing of players, the obsessions and romance of the game, the bonds between players and fans, parents and children. From a key play, a missed catch, a chance lost, these are tales of characters facing high stakes and calls to action, metaphorically and literally, in the bottom of the ninth.
Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen—“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the Chicago Tribune: “A reader finishes them buzzing with awe”—Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade. Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers’ attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear. Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.”
Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris are forever intertwined in baseball history thanks to the unforgettable 1961 season, when the two Yankee icons spurred each other to new heights in pursuit of Babe Ruth's home run record. History has largely overlooked the bond between the two men not as titans of their sport, but as people. Guided by Tony Castro, bestselling author and foremost chronicler of Mantle, readers will journey into history, from the Yankees' blockbuster trade for Maris, whose acquisition re-ignited Mantle's career after a horrendous 1959 season, to the heroics of 1961 and far beyond. This dual biography is a thoroughly researched, emotionally gripping portrait that brings Yankees lore alive.
Extra Innings tackles the question of how writing about baseball has shaped our understanding and misunderstanding of the national pastime. In a series of astute reflections on baseball histories, biographies, personal reminiscences, and fiction, Richard Peterson explores the shifting balance of romance and fact in standard baseball histories, offers a lively discussion of baseball fiction, and assesses the realism of postmodern baseball writing. He discusses the influence of Jackie Robinson on the serious baseball novel and the reluctance of baseball fiction to treat race issues realistically. He also surveys baseball fleeting appearances in the literary canon and suggests a "top nine" reading list for the baseball aficionado. Slicing away the myths and distortions of baseball's bizarre history, Extra Innings.
The Authentic Journey Continues -- for Women to Understand Men, and for Men to Understand Themselves.
I’ve been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidante and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I’d have to list darts, re-closing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way. This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen—familiar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeney’s to The New Yorker to Harper’s to Tin House—encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine. A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg flies to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure. Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard’s voice never falters; the virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen cements his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, “a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart”—in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.
Bursting with wicked humor and driven by an incomparable understanding of what it means to be human, The World to Come is the inimitable work of “the most ambitious story writer in America” (The Daily Beast). Now a major motion picture Shepard traverses both borders and centuries, seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, and giving voice to visionaries, pioneers, and secret misfits—from nineteenth-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions to twentieth-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard’s characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings. "[Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into 30 or 40 pages.” —The Boston Globe
Current Trends in Narratology offers an overview of cutting-edge approaches to theories of storytelling. It describes the move to cognition, the new emphasis on non-prose and multimedia narratives, and introduces a third field of research - comparative narratology. This research addresses how local institutions and national approaches have affected the development of narratology. Leading researchers detail their newest scholarship while placing it within the scope of larger international trends.