In this remarkable debut novel from the editor of The Paris Review, we follow the fictional Los Angeles Lions baseball team as they embark upon spring training in Arizona. With nine chapters serving as connected short stories, we see the larger picture of the team, the star slugger struggling with addiction and divorce, the women hanging around the parking lots, the coaches and executives, organ players, and devoted kid fans. Baseball is all about the long game, and this novel perfectly captures the permanence of the institution throughout the changing landscape, environment and dynamic characters.
A heartwarming tale of the bond between humans and animals, Running With Sherman (Knopf, $27.95), by Christopher McDougall—best known for his bestselling Born to Run—is another masterful, fun, and inspiring memoir. This time he tells the story of Sherman, an abused donkey McDougall and his family adopted and brought to their farm in the Amish Country. Sherman was not expected to survive, but after McDougall did as someone advised and gave him a job—the donkey began to thrive. The job was preparing for the World Championship Leadville Burro Race in Colorado, an annual marathon run by humans and donkeys, side-by-side. Full of the kind of kooky characters and long-distance runners typical of McDougall’s other books, this one is more than just a compelling, feel-good page-turner. It’s also a powerful argument for why animals matter in our evolution of society, and how damaged we humans become when we turn away from them.
In her latest memoir, Travel Light, Move Fast (Penguin Press, $27), Alexandra Fuller returns to the family history and African childhood that made her 2001 Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight a classic. Recounting her upbringing on a farm in war-torn Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Alexandra chronicles the incomparable and fastmoving life of her ex-pat father, Tim Fuller. Starting with his death a few years ago, Fuller highlights the nuggets of wisdom Tim gathered over the course of his life from experiences that included his sense of himself as a black sheep, his self-exile from England, his role as patriarch of his own family, and his efforts, throughout Africa, to grow bananas in the midst of post-colonial revolutions. Moving through her grief, Fuller mines her memories and her father’s example for the resilience she needs to navigate the challenges of her own life. Writing with her signature striking, beautiful prose and hilarious anecdotes, Fuller effortlessly blends her story and her father’s into a moving account of an unconventional family.
