New York Times Bestseller “An ideal Father’s Day present...It’s this year’s baseball book most likely to be made into a terrific movie.” —The Chicago Tribune “Affecting...A simply told, deeply moving story, quite unlike the usual baseball book.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A baseball rules book. A tape measure. A lottery ticket.

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican AmericansÑfrom 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolishedÑto understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity. Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational waysÑthat is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

Erin Osmon presents a detailed, human account of the Rust Belt–born musician Jason Molina—a visionary, prolific, and at times cantankerous singer-songwriter with an autodidactic style that captivated his devoted fans. The songwriting giant behind the bands Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. had a knack for spinning tales, from the many personal myths he cultivated throughout his life to the poems and ballads he penned and performed. As with too many great musicians, Molina’s complicated relationship with the truth, combined with a secretive relationship with the bottle, ultimately claimed his life. Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost details Molina’s personal trials and triumphs and reveals for the first time the true story of Molina’s last months and works, including an unpublished album unknown to many of his fans. Offering unfettered access to the mind and artistry of Molina through exclusive interviews with family, friends, and collaborators, the book also explores the Midwest music underground and the development of Bloomington, Indiana–based label Secretly Canadian. As the first authorized and detailed account of this prolific songwriter and self-mythologizer, Jason Molina provides readers with unparalleled insight into Molina’s tormented life and the fascinating Midwest musical underground that birthed him. It’s a story for the ages that speaks volumes to the triumphs and trials of the artistic spirit while exploring the meaningful music that Molina’s creative genius left behind.

"[A] translucent novel of passion, illusion and social class....slyly witty and luminous." —Francine Prose in O, The Oprah Magazine During working hours, Mario is a dutiful bureaucrat, scrupulously earning his paycheck as an employee of the provincial Spanish town where he lives. But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits. Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage. How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Muñoz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.

Spanish theologian Luis de Molina is enjoying a quiet resurgence among Protestant scholars, a late appreciation for the Reformation-era Jesuit and contemporary of Calvin and Arminius. In the first full work ever on Molina, author Kirk R. MacGregor explores the life and original contributions of the brilliant philosophical theologian.

Shows how science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Examining the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, this book illustrates the ways health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and define racial groups.

A hypnotic novel intertwining the author’s past with James Earl Ray’s attempt to escape after shooting Martin Luther King Jr. The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media’s confusion about his location and his image on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities. Using recently declassified FBI files, Antonio Muñoz Molina reconstructs Ray’s final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Muñoz Molina’s first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now, thirty years later, it becomes the stage for and witness to three alternating stories: Ray in 1968 at the center of an international manhunt; a thirty-year-old Muñoz Molina in 1987 struggling to find his literary voice; and the author in the present, reflecting on his life and the form of the novel as an instrument for imagining the world through another person’s eyes. Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.