Our Baseball Bookshelf

Baseball is back! And in honor of this week’s opening of the 2012 major league baseball season, we’re taking a look at Overlook’s baseball bookshelf.

Arguably one of the greatest books ever written about the sport is Robert Coover’s classic 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Reissued last year by Overlook, this timeless novel received a glowing tribute in The New York Times Book Review by Matt Weiland.

New in paperback this Spring is The Night Casey Was Born, a lively history of the most famous baseball poem of all time, Casey at the Bat. Author John Evangelist Walsh tells the story behind the poem and its young journalist author, as well as its inaugural performance in 1888 in New York's Wallack's Theater by DeWolf Hopper. The Night Casey was Born is a portrait of America in the earliest years of its love affair with baseball.

Billy Lombado’s The Man with Two Arms is a literary novel featuring a switch-pitcher who rises up through the ranks and baseball diamonds all over the country. It will thrill Chicago baseball fans, and appeal to all with a tender father-son story . Critic Alan Cheuse notes: “Undoubtedly modern America’s finest literary tribute to the baseball since Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural . . . Lombardo’s one of a kind novel about a one of a kind ball player becomes as engrossing as a perfect game going into the late innings. If you’re in the stands, you don’t want to look away from the field, let alone leave the stadium early. Those who love to read about this great pastime will have the same feeling when reading about Denny Grenville, on and off the field.”

And for the younger crowd, we recommend Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars by Walter Brooks, with illustrations by Kurt Wiese. The Freddy the Pig books, long considered classics of American children's literature are with each reissue by Overlook Press finding new readers. In this volume, Freddy organizes a Martian baseball team! Anyone who can imagine a baseball team consisting of Martians, an elephant, an ostrich, and Mr. Boorschmidt, with Freddy as coach, has a slight idea of what's in store.

Robert Coover's Classic Baseball Novel Back in Print

One of the great baseball novels of all time - Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Proprieter - is back in print, in a new edition published this week by The Overlook Press.

Robert Coover, one of the most admired writers of our generation, is the author of many novels, most recently Noir, and has also written short story collections and plays. His work has won the William Faulkner Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

Matt Weiland's recent essay, "A Veteran Baseball Novel Comes off the Bench," in The New York Times Book Review (August 26), pays homage to Coover's amazing, and prescient, 1968 novel:

"Right from the start the book nearly matches On the Road for sheer electricity . . . Coover made baseball on the page seem three-dimensional, exulting in what he called the game's 'almost perfect balance between offense and defense.' He captured what Philip Roth, in a 1973 New York Times essay on baseball, called 'its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its 'characters,' its peculiarly hypnotic tedium'. . . The genius of the novel is in how Coover revels in the sun-bright vitality of the world Waugh has created, full of drink and lust and dirty limericks and doubles down the line -- and yet brings Waugh face to face with its darkest truths."