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Sourland: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates from HarperCollins is $1.99 (US Kindle)

Book Description

A gripping and moving new collection of stories that reimagines the meaning of loss—through often unexpected and violent means.

Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled master of the short story. Sourland—sixteen previously uncollected stories that explore how the power of violence, loss, and grief shape both the psyche and the soul—shows us an author work-ing at the height of her powers.

With lapidary precision and an unflinching eye, Oates maps the surprising contours of “ordinary” life. From a desperate man who dons a jack-o’-lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship, to a “story of a stabbing” many times recounted in the life of a lonely girl; from a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father, to a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin; from a professor’s wife who finds herself tragically isolated at a party in her own house, to the concluding title story of an unexpectedly redemptive love rooted in radical aloneness and isolation, each story in Sourland resonates beautifully with Oates’s trademark fascination for the unpredictable amid the prosaic—the comming-ling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life—and shines with her predilection for dark humor and her gift for voice.

Chasing October: The Dodgers-Giants Pennant Race of 1962 by David Plaut from Argo-Navis is $1.99 (US Kindle)

Book Description

From the first pitch of April until the final out in October, the 1962 Dodgers and Giants staged a furious pennant fight that was every bit the equal of the fractious feuds waged during the rivalry's New York heyday of bench-clearing brawls.

Set in what many call “the last year of American innocence,” the 1962 National League pennant race was in a new context—a 10-team league including Houston and the Mets, a 162-game schedule, and the new Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. But it also had plenty of tradition. Names like Snider and Mays, Durocher and Dark were still in uniform 11 years after the celebrated Giants-Dodgers playoff decided by Bobby Thompson's homer in the ninth in 1951. The move west in 1958 had not mellowed any memories—Candlestick Park and Dodger Stadium replaced the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, but the intensity of mutual dislike was the same. Add to this the uncanny resemblance of the Dodger-Giant standings going into the 1962 playoffs to that of their 1951 ranking, and you have a season-ending script that stands as one of the most memorable and amazing in the game's history.

In CHASING OCTOBER, David Plaut captures in fascinating detail all the great moments, raw emotion, and nail-biting suspense of the unforgettable fight to the finish. Each team finished the regular season with imposing 101-61 records. Each had its heroes: Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Felipe Alou, and Jack Sanford were Bay Area favorites. In Los Angeles, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, Tommy Davis, and Frank Howard were as recognizable as the Hollywood celebrities who turned out nightly at Chavez Ravine to cheer them on. Each team had their own pressures as well. Younger Dodgers supported manager Walt Alston, others openly preferred coach Leo Derocher. On the Giants, minority players were not always enamored of their manager, Alvin Dark. Just as in 1951, the playoff featured rallies, drama, and tactical blunders that sent the action into the ninth inning of the final game before being decided.

With updates and a new preface, this 50th Anniversary Edition of CHASING OCTOBER is a must not only for the fans of these two exciting franchises, but for any lover of baseball. In capturing the exhilarating spirit of the intense rivalry between the Dodgers and Giants, Plaut gets to the essence of baseball's hold on the imagination.

This Dark Earth by John Hornor Jacobs from Gallery Books/Simon and Schuster is $3.99 (US Kindle)

Book Description

The land is contaminated, electronics are defunct, the ravenous undead remain, and life has fallen into a nasty and brutish state of nature. Welcome to Bridge City, in what was once Arkansas: part medieval fortress, part Western outpost, and the precarious last stand for civilization. A ten-year-old prodigy when the world ended, Gus is now a battle-hardened young man. He designed Bridge City to protect the living few from the shamblers eternally at the gates. Now he's being groomed by his physician mother, Lucy, and the gentle giant Knock-Out to become the next leader of men. But an army of slavers is on its way, and the war they'll wage for the city's resources could mean the end of mankind as we know it.

Can Gus become humanity's savior? And if so, will it mean becoming a dictator, a martyr . . . or maybe something far worse than even the zombies that plague the land?