Adult

Every mother knows best, but New Yorker writer Patty Marx's knows better. Patty has never been able to shake her mother's one-line witticisms from her brain, so she has collected them into a book, accompanied by full-color illustrations by New Yorker staff cartoonist Roz Chast. These snappy maternal cautions include: 1) If you feel guilty about throwing away leftovers, put them in the back of your refrigerator for five days and then throw them out. 2) If you run out of food at your dinner party, the world will end. 3) When traveling, call the hotel from the airport to say there aren't enough towels in your room and, by the way, you'd like a room with a better view. 4) Why don't you write my eulogy now so I can correct it?

New York psychologist Will Hardy had it all --- a loving family, a flourishing career, a bestselling book. Until the night it all ended in a tempest of fire and ash, leaving only Will and his 15-year-old daughter, Bernadette, to stand in the ruins. Haunted and grief-stricken, Will accepts an enigmatic invitation from his family’s past to begin their lives anew in the small town of Abbeville, Ohio. Meanwhile, Abbeville Chief of Police Ivy Holgrave is investigating the death of a local girl, convinced this may be only the latest in a long line of murders dating back decades --- including her own long-missing sister. But what place does Will's new home have in the story of the missing girls? And what links the killings to the diary of a young woman written over a century earlier?

The baseball is an amazing plaything. We can grip it and hold it so many different ways, and even the slightest calibration can turn an ordinary pitch into a weapon to thwart the greatest hitters in the world. Each pitch has its own history, evolving through the decades as the masters pass it down to the next generation. From the earliest days of the game, when Candy Cummings dreamed up the curveball while flinging clamshells on a Brooklyn beach, pitchers have never stopped innovating. In K, Tyler Kepner traces the colorful stories and fascinating folklore behind the 10 major pitches. Each chapter highlights a different pitch, from the blazing fastball to the fluttering knuckleball to the slippery spitball.

DOC, DONNIE, THE KID, AND BILLY BRAWL focuses on the 1985 New York baseball season, a season like no other since the Mets came to town in 1962. Never before had both the Yankees and the Mets been in contention for the playoffs so late in the same season. For months, New York fans dreamed of the first Subway Series in nearly 30 years, and the Mets and the Yankees vied for their hearts. Despite their nearly identical records, the two teams were drastically different in performance and clubhouse atmosphere. The result was the most attention-grabbing and exciting season New York would see in generations.

In 108 STITCHES, Ron Darling offers his own take on the "six degrees of separation" game and knits together a collection of wild, wise and wistful stories reflecting the full arc of a life in and around our national pastime. Darling has played with or reported on just about everybody who has put on a uniform since 1983, and they in turn have played with or reported on just about everybody who put on a uniform in a previous generation. Through relationships with baseball legends on and off the field, like Yale coach Smoky Joe Wood, Willie Mays, Bart Giamatti, Tom Seaver and Mickey Mantle, Darling's reminiscences reach all the way back to Babe Ruth and other turn-of-the-century greats.

It has been 20 years since Prince Bifalt of Belleger discovered the Last Repository and the sorcerous knowledge hidden there. At the behest of the repository's magisters, and in return for the restoration of sorcery to both kingdoms, the realms of Belleger and Amika ceased generations of war. Their alliance was sealed with the marriage of Bifalt to Estie, the crown princess of Amika. But the peace --- and their marriage --- has been uneasy. An ancient enemy has discovered the location of the Last Repository, and a mighty horde of dark forces is massing to attack the library and take the magical knowledge it guards. That horde will slaughter every man, woman and child in its path, destroying both Belleger and Amika along the way.

A VOLUNTARY CRUCIFIXION traces the story of 20th-century Canada through the MacKinnon clan and David J. MacKinnon's life. Disillusioned with the slow death of the soul promised by life at a major Montreal law firm, MacKinnon ripped himself untimely from the profession, making a personal vow to discover society “from the bottom up.” A VOLUNTARY CRUCIFIXION recounts the tale of MacKinnon's adventures and misadventures from post-Tiananmen Hong Kong to various ports of call in the Indian Ocean, offering his views on everything from censorship to indigenous issues, all of which reflect his life ethos that the key to life is to refuse to adapt, and to fight tooth-and-nail for every square inch of your freedom before others wrench it from you.

At a boarding school in New Hampshire, Ben joins the honor society led by Pierre LaVerdere, an enigmatic and brilliant, yet perverse, teacher who instructs his students not only about how to reason, but how to prevaricate. As the years go by, LaVerdere's covert and overt instruction lingers in his students' lives as they seek some sense of purpose or meaning. While relationships with his stepmother and sister improve, and a move to upstate New York offers respite from his anxiety about love and work, LaVerdere's reappearance in his life disturbs his equilibrium. Everything he once thought he knew about his teacher --- and himself --- is called into question.

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of them has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, these women --- all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country in which they live --- have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known, or should they dare to escape?

The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: If emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In STONY THE ROAD, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.