Publisher Description

These 13 short stories represent the author's work in this genre from 1946 to 1993. They were undertaken at a time when the author was becoming famous as a novelist for such works as "Bang the Drum Slowly" and "The Southpaw". The primary subject of these stories would seem to be the human condition and the shifts of mortal men and women as they try to understand and survive what life has dealt them.

Author Biography

Mark Harris (1922-2007) is the author of a famous quartet of baseball novels—including Bang the Drum Slowly—as well as Something about a Soldier, Speed, and The Talemaker. All are available as Bison Books. Jon Surgal is a writer and critic. His father introduced him to baseball and the work of Mark Harris.

Review

"During a hiking trip in the French Pyrenees in 1983, Ostrum stumbled upon a remarkable story of resistance to the Nazis... [The conspirators'] compelling tale is only part of the story, as themes of class, modernity and deceit are handled gracefully by the author... Ostrum has created a compelling work of 20th-century European history."

Kirkus US Review

Baseball maven Harris, best known for his 1956 novel, Bang the Drum Slowly, collects 13 tales (1946-93), only a few of them about America's favorite pastime - though Harris does sometime use baseball as a template for living life fully and wisely. In the title story, written in a strange, depersonalized voice echoing the language for handbooks, a storekeeper runs a noninvasive "brain surgery" lab in his backroom, which is actually a psychology lab for getting local "patients" back on track with their lives. While leading to an artistic unity on a more ambitious level than any other story here, the depersonalization acts against the warmth seen so engagingly and straightforwardly elsewhere herein. The immensely amusing earliest piece (from 1946), "Jackie Robinson and My Sister," asks whether or not Harris would want his sister married to the major leagues' first black player - she is in fact only twelve and in sixth grade. The latest story (1993), "The Bonding," the high-water mark here for richness of feeling, shows how the 69-year-old author bonds with a local pickup team on which he plays left field. "Flattery" tells how an elderly English teacher is suckered by an itinerant con man, while "Carmelita's Education for Living" reveals how a college-student counselor, whose fields of concentration are Middle English and modern women, tries to entrance a young lady with blond bangs, blue eyes, and bare legs into studying Middle English. All told, a strong collection that places each bemused word just where it works best on the playing field. (Kirkus Reviews)

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