Subscribe
Great works of fiction and nonfiction -- perfect for reading between games.
Mark Frost is a man of many talents. As a groundbreaking TV writer and producer, he co-created the hit series Twin Peaks. As a writer he's penned atmospheric thrillers like The Second Objective and acclaimed sports classics including The Greatest Game Ever Played and The Match. His latest is a lovingly close look at one of baseball's greatest matchups, Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime. Below, the author recommends some favorite pastimes of his own.
By Roger Kahn
"Kahn's beloved memoir about his years as a beat reporter with the great post-war Brooklyn Dodgers teams is one of the cornerstones of modern sports literature, but this smaller and more recent work - a penetrating examination of the lives, minds, and innovations of baseball's pioneering pitchers - taught me even more about the evolution of the game and its most exceptional athletes. "
By Richard Ford
"The Frank Bascombe 'trilogy' -- which includes The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land -- has more to say about the turbulence, confusions and dissolution of the American male identity in the second half of the twentieth century than anything else in print. Exquisitely detailed, heartbreakingly eloquent and laugh out loud funny on every single page, it towers over contemporary fiction the way 'The Sopranos' compares to the splintered wreckage of modern network television. If this isn't the Great American Novel, then we're never going to see one. "
By Thornton Wilder
"What if, instead of the self-destructive, egotistical, hard-drinking Mid-century authors who dominated and distorted America's ideal of what a "writer" should be, we had instead settled on Thornton Wilder: a gentleman teacher, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher and searcher, and whose deceptively simple themes and diverse storytelling skills are as timeless as Shakespeare. Once you absorb this haunting portrait of random lives united by inexplicable tragedy into your soul you'll remember it forever."
Email
Print
Share
Emma Brockes' mother Paula escaped from South Africa with a smuggled pistol and a dark secret. A daughter unravels her family's covert past -- and a suspenseful legal drama -- in this hard-boiled memoir of survival.
Expand your memory, puzzle-solving skills, and sense of metaphysical wonder with philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's tasting menu of user-friendly neuroscience and poetic lingual pursuits.
Thespian-turned-P.I. Jasmine Sharp searches for a missing actress and veteran detective Catherine MacLeod tries to solve the case of a murdered one. Their paths intertwine amid the Scottish theater community with uproarious and gory results.
Please sign in to add a comment on this article.