An ambitious Harlem woman’s husband upends her social climbing when he buys a Negro Leagues baseball team and appoints her as the team’s business manager. Overnight, Effa Manley goes from 125th Street’s civil rights champion to an interloper in the boys’ club that is professional baseball. Navigating her way through gentlemen’s agreement contracts, the very public flirtatious antics of superstar Satchel Paige, and a sports world that would much rather see this woman back in her “place” at home, Effa ultimately whips her team, the Newark Eagles, into the Negro Leagues Champions of 1946. But how long will she get to enjoy the fruits of her success before Major League Baseball tears it all apart?

For the past 15 years, Ian Frazier has been walking the Bronx. PARADISE BRONX reveals the rich and tumultuous history of this amazingly various piece of our greatest city. From Jonas Bronck, who bought land from the local Native Americans, to the formerly gang-wracked South Bronx that gave birth to hip-hop, Frazier’s loving exploration is a moving tour de force about the polyglot culture that is America today.

Clayton Kershaw has embodied the burden of athletic greatness, the prizes and perils that await those who strive for it all. He is a three-time Cy Young award winner, the first pitcher to win National League MVP since Bob Gibson, and a surefire, first-ballot Hall of Famer. In an age when baseball became more impersonal, a sport altered by adherence to algorithms and actuarial tables, Kershaw personified the game’s lingering humanity. THE LAST OF HIS KIND traces Kershaw’s path from a boyhood fractured by divorce to his development as one of the most heralded pitching prospects in Texas history to his emergence in Los Angeles as the spiritual heir to Sandy Koufax. But the book also charts Kershaw’s place in baseball’s changing landscape, as his own stubbornness butted against the game’s evolution.

When Brian Cashman arrived in the Bronx as an intern in 1986, he discovered a team in chaos, run on impulse and emotion, and lacking the sheen that had defined the Yankees in earlier eras. Decades later, Cashman had risen through the ranks of the front office, earned the trust of the Steinbrenner family, and become the longest-serving GM in the Yankees’ storied history, helping to transform the Yankees to glory with a string of World Series championships and an unmatched streak of winning seasons. With unprecedented inside access and featuring exclusive interviews with Cashman, owner Hal Steinbrenner, top front-office executives, and current Yankee stars and coaches, award-winning baseball journalist Andy Martino gives fans a view from the GM’s seat that we would never normally see.

Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago that still stands today. He was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati who made it. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified --- until he wasn’t. In the 1980s, Pete Rose came to be at the center of one of the biggest scandals in baseball history. He kept secrets, ran with bookies, took on massive gambling debts, and was magnificently, publicly cast out for betting on baseball and lying about it. The revelations that followed ruined him, changed life in Cincinnati and forever altered the game. CHARLIE HUSTLE tells the full story of one of America’s most epic tragedies --- the rise and fall of Pete Rose.

Baseball is “the New York game” because New York is where the diamond was first laid out, where the bunt and the curveball were invented, and where the home run was hit. It’s where the game’s first stars were born, and where everyone came to play or watch the game. With nuance and depth, historian Kevin Baker brings this all vividly back to life: the still-controversial, indelible moments. Did the Babe call his shot? Was Merkle out? Did they fix the 1919 World Series? In Baker's hands, the city and the game emerge from the murk of 19th-century American life --- driven by visionaries and fixers, heroes and gangsters. He details how New York and its favorite sport came to mirror one another, expanding, bumbling through catastrophe and corruption, and rising out of these trials stronger than ever.

In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s 3 SHADES OF BLUE captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, business, race, heroin, the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most. It’s a book about the great forebears and founders of a lost era, and the disrupters who would take the music down truly new paths. And it’s about why the world of jazz most people know is a museum to this never-replicated period. But above all, 3 SHADES OF BLUE is a book about three very different men --- the greatness and varied fortunes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans.

Despite being hailed as one of the best guitarists of his era, George Harrison, particularly in his early decades, battled feelings of inferiority. He was often the butt of jokes from his bandmates owing to his lower-class background and, typically, was allowed to contribute only one or two songs per Beatles album out of the dozens he wrote. Now, acclaimed Beatles biographer Philip Norman examines Harrison through the lens of his numerous self-contradictions. This rich biography captures him at his most multifaceted: devoted friend, loyal son, master guitar player, brilliant songwriter, cocaine addict, serial philanderer, global philanthropist, student of Indian mysticism, self-deprecating comedian, and, ultimately, iconic artist and man beloved by millions.

John Prine hated giving interviews, but he said much when he talked. Embarrassed by fame, delighted by the smallest things, the first songwriter to read at the Library of Congress, and winner of the Pen Award for Literary Excellence, Prine saw the world unlike anyone else. The songs from 1971’s John Prine remain spot-on takes of the human condition today, and his writing only got richer, funnier and more incisive. The interviews in PRINE ON PRINE trace his career evolution, his singular mind, his enduring awareness of social issues, and his acute love of life.

In WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, Joe Posnanski writes of major moments that created legends, and of forgotten moments almost lost to time. It's Willie Mays’ catch, Babe Ruth’s called shot and Kirk Gibson’s limping home run; the slickest steals; the biggest bombs; and the most triumphant no-hitters. But these are also moments raw with the humanity of the game, the unheralded heroes and the mesmerizing mistakes drenched in pine tar. Every story, from the immortal to the obscure, is told from a unique perspective. Whether of a real fan who witnessed it, or the pitcher who gave up the home run, the umpire, the coach, the opposing player --- these are fresh takes on moments so powerful they almost feel like myth.