On trial for treason, Andrew Jackson Fielder looks back on his brief career as a major league pitcher, and his experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war

Baseball: no other sport can claim its drama, its rhythms-or as many writers among its fans. These twenty-seven selections are by authors ranging from Lardner to Malamud.

In 1969, Brad Williams thought baseball might save his lifeNif he wasn't shipped off to Vietnam. He desperately needed a college baseball scholarship, but violence from integration and the Vietnam draft shattered his neighborhood and tested his conscience. The time came to choose sides. But how could he play it safe when so much was at stake?

W.D. Fielder's prim Virginia bred mother certainly wasn't looking for her seventeen-year-old's disgusting pinup magazines. But when she found them, while cleaning up his room, that rainy spring afternoon in 1989, she just kind of lost it. She had never raised a hand to either of the twins, William David or Wallace Daniel, but she did that day and paid for her lose of control with her life. Over the next decade, the late Edna Fielder's miscalculation fostered a flood of missing persons reports being lodged with the Barnwell County, Maryland Sheriff's department, but none of the almost three dozen missing women were ever found. The authorities, chagrined at being unable to solve even a single one of the cases, took the position that the girls had most likely just run away to see the world in Washington, D.C. or Baltimore or maybe even New York City. Then the newspaper publisher's daughter disappears while investigating the controversial Forest Vista land development project, located on one of the Fielder family properties, and all hell breaks loose. From the opulent corporate boardrooms of Washington, D.C. to the drug infested Baltimore slums and the rich rural farmlands in between, follow Jillian Hargrove and Architect Romulus Reynolds as they search for Reporter Chelsa Wellington and the other missing girls, even as the WD's track their every move. Initially reluctant to accede to his client's request to get involved in the search for the missing reporter, Reynolds is even more reticent in agreeing to let Jillian help. It's not just that she represents a group of neighbors, who want to stop his client's project. What really makes him uncomfortable is the possibility that she has become the kidnapper's next target. As their investigation reveals the magnitude of the twins' depravity, Rom's reservations are complicated by the fact that he has fallen passionately in love with Jillian. As their relationship deepens and the investigation accelerates, so do his fears that he will soon be coming face to face with the prospect of Jillian's death at the hands of the twins.

Filled with rich evocations of childhood, travel and landscape, Fielder's Choice, Elise Partridge's masterful debut, delivers up fresh and striking elegiac poems that grapple with their subjects vigorously, unpredictably, and without sentimentality. Partridge's poetry combines a gifted ear for the vernacular and exuberant verbal skills with an exceptional-and often emotionally powerful-lyric intelligence.

The Sonora nine finds themselves pitted against a powerful champion, but are confident of their ability to win against their highly-favored opponent because of their knowledge of sound baseball strategy. When the newspapers begin to center their publicity on Bronc, a breach comes between him and his teammates. He comes back to pitch the championship game, trying desparately to win without being a star.