Home runs! Great baseball fiction
Discover the best baseball fiction books filled with home runs and gripping stories! Explore our curated list of great baseball novels for fans and readers.
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Shoeless Joe
by W. P. Kinsella
Inspiration for the movie "Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe" is the ultimate baseball novel.
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The Celebrant
by Eric Rolfe Greenberg
The first two decades of the twentieth century were a time of promise and innocence in America. Hardworking immigrants could achieve the American dream; heroes were truly heroic. Eric Rolfe Greenberg brilliantly and 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. In these pages Mathewson and other great players like John McGraw, Honus Wagner, and Connie Mack discover the realities behind the shining illusions: the burdens of being a hero and the temptations that taint success.
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Hoopla
by Harry Stein
When eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, the team became known as the "Black Sox." Hoopla blends the narrative of team member George Weaver with the view of Luther Pond, who exposed the scandal. Filled with cameo portraits of prominent sports legends of the early twentieth century, this novel brings to life an era when America was passionate, even patriotic, about baseball; and when one reporter's words had the power to rock a nation.
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If I Never Get Back
by Darryl Brock
Time travel meets baseball in this ¿grand adventure¿ about a modern-day reporter who witnesses the birth of America¿s favorite pastime (The Washington Times) Contemporary reporter Sam Fowler is stuck in a dull job and a failing marriage when he is suddenly transported back to the summer of 1869. After a wrenching period of adjustment, he feels rejuvenated by his involvement with the nation¿s first pro baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. But American sports isn't the only thing to undergo a major transformation¿Sam himself starts to change as he faces life-threatening 19th-century challenges on and off the baseball diamond. With the support of his fellow ballplayers and the lovely Caitlin O'Neill, will he regain the sense of family he desperately needs? Darryl Brock masterfully evokes post-Civil War America¿its smoky cities and transcontinental railroad, its dance halls and parlour houses, its financial booms and busts. Equally appealing to sports fans and anyone who appreciates a well-told story, If I Never Get Back is a literary home run that "grabs you from line one on page one and never lets go" (San Francisco Chronicle).
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The Southpaw
The Southpaw 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 right-handed 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. Although Mark Harris loves and writes tellingly about the pleasures of baseball, his primary subject has always been the human condition and the shifts of mortal men and women as they try to understand and survive what life has dealt them. ø This new Bison Books edition celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Southpaw. In his introduction to this edition, Mark Harris discusses the genesis of the novel in his own life experience. Also available in Bison Books editions are The Southpaw, It Looked Like For Ever, and A Ticket for a Seamstitch, the other three volumes in the Henry Wiggen series.
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The Natural
by Bernard Malamud
Malamud uses the fanatical and aggressive world of professional baseball to mirror contemporary society.
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The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
by W. P. Kinsella
From the author of the bestselling "Shoeless Joe" comes another vintage baseball tale that "like magic . . . holds together and entices you from one page to the next, until at the end you ache for more" ("Milwaukee Journal").
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Dreyfus Affair
by Peter Lefcourt
The best-hitting, best-fielding young shortstop in America, Randy Dreyfus is his country's hero, but when his affair with second baseman D.J. Pickett is discovered, nothing will ever be the same again.