A poignant portrayal of professional ballplayers' lives on and off the field during the sport's golden years in the 1950's.

Henry Wiggen, the bedraggled six-foot-three, 195-pound, left-handed pitcher for the New York Mammoths, returns to narrate another novel in his inimitable manner. Fans who loved him in Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw, and A Ticket for a Seamstitch (all Bison Books) will cheer his comeback. Wiggen is now thirty-nine, a fading veteran with a floating fastball, a finicky prostate, and other intimations of mortality. Released from the Mammoths after nineteen years, the twenty-seventh winningest pitcher in baseball history (tied at 247 victories with Joseph J. "Iron Man" McGinnity and John Powell), Wiggen is not ready to hang up his glove. What impels Henry to pitch against Pate, to trek to California and as far as Japan? He still has a few seasons, a few innings left anyway. Is he principled or possessed? You'll have to decide for yourself as author Mark Harris plays out Wiggen's midlife crisis on familiar American turf: the baseball diamond.

Story of baseball player Henry Wiggen throwing a baseball for the sake of his pocket, his family, his teammates, and dying friend.

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment--to oneself and to others.

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

Mark Harris took you out to the ballgame in his Henry Wiggen novels, The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, A Ticket for a Seamstitch, and It Looked Like For Ever. In The Tale Maker, he takes you to college. Rimrose was well-read, smart, and strong. As the editor of the campus Sentinel, he was perfectly placed to observe how a university worked, and ideally inclined to expose its ethical weaknesses. Supported by his parents, he could concentrate on things that mattered: his writing, his wife-to-be, and his friends and enemies—including the warped Kakapick, who serves Rimrose lastingly as model and prototype of the literary scoundrel. Rimrose—Tale Maker of the title—turns from journalism to fiction-writing, kept alive by his wife’s practical and ingenious devotion to selling his stories, even those he has tossed in the trash. As he grows older and begets children, he worries about income and faces stultifying choices: managing his father’s small-town newspaper or playing politics in university service.