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.

One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their half-full bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into her mind and won’t leave. The mysterious drawing launches Jia Jia on an odyssey across contemporary Beijing as her path crosses some of the people who call the city home. Unencumbered by a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia travels into her past to try to discover things that were left unsaid by the people closest to her.

After 25 years on the job, Detective Roscoe Conklin moves to Bonaire, a small island nestled in the southern Caribbean. But when his longtime police buddy and friend back home is murdered, Conklin calls his old department, trolling for information. It’s slow going. No surprise, there. After all, it’s an active investigation, and his compadres back home aren’t saying a word. When a suspicious mishap lands his significant other, Arabella, in the hospital, the island police conduct, at best, a sluggish investigation, stonewalling progress. Conklin questions the evidence and challenges the department’s methods. Something isn’t right. Arabella wasn’t the intended target. He was.

Spring arrives in northern Virginia, and the women of St. Luke’s Lutheran Church prepare for a Homecoming celebration like no other. Mary Minor “Harry” Harristeen, Susan Tucker and their friends are busy planting flowers and trimming hedges to get the church grounds in shape for the big day. But a note of a menace mars the beautiful spring: The brewery owned by Janice Childs and Mags Nielsen, two members of the gardening committee, gets robbed, with hundreds of dollars in merchandise taken off their delivery trucks. When Jeannie Cordle drops dead at a charity auction, poisoned by a fatal weed, Harry’s worst suspicions are confirmed: a killer lurks in their midst, one with a keen understanding of poisonous plants.

For Sera Wheeler, the Olympics is the reason for everything. It’s why she trains 30 hours a week and starves herself to under 100 pounds. For her mother, Charlene --- hungry for glory she never had --- it’s why she rises before dawn to drive Sera to practice in a different state. It’s why, when Sera’s best friend reports the gymnastics doctor to the authority who selects the Olympic Team, Sera denies what she knows about his treatments, thus preserving favor. Their friendship shatters. Sera doubles down, taping broken toes, numbing torn muscles and pouring her family’s resources into the sport. Soon she isn’t training for the love of gymnastics. She’s training to make her disloyalty worthwhile. No matter the cost.

Beth, Portia and Eddie Morgan haven't all been together in years. And for very good reasons --- we'll get to those later. But when their wealthy grandfather dies and leaves a cryptic final message in his wake, the siblings and their respective partners must come together for a cross-country road trip to fulfill his final wish and --- more importantly --- secure their inheritance. But time with your family can be tough. It is for everyone. It's even harder when you're all keeping secrets and trying to forget a memory, a missing person, an act of revenge, the man in the black truck who won't stop following your car --- and especially when at least one of you is a killer and there's a body in the trunk. Just to name a few reasons. But money is a powerful motivator. It is for everyone.

Jade Thompson is an up-and-coming social media influencer whose fiancé, Greg, is a successful architect. To Greg’s children, his divorce from their mother and his new life can only mean a big mid-life crisis. To Jade, his suburban Connecticut upbringing isn’t an easy match with her Caribbean roots. A savage home invasion leaves Greg house-bound with a traumatic brain injury and glued to the live feeds from his ubiquitous security cameras. As the police investigate the crime, Jade begins to wonder what he may know about their attackers. And whether they are coming back. As Greg watches Jade’s comings and goings, he becomes convinced that her behavior is suspicious and that she’s hiding a big secret.

Detective Tracy Crosswhite has been reassigned to the Seattle PD’s cold case unit and is immediately drawn to her first file: the abduction of a five-year-old girl whose parents, embattled in a poisonous divorce, were once prime suspects. While reconstructing the days leading up to the girl’s disappearance, Tracy is brought into an active investigation with former partner Kinsington Rowe. A young woman has vanished on an isolated jogging trail in North Seattle. To find two missing persons, Tracy will have to follow more than clues, which are both long cold and unsettlingly fresh. Given her own traumatic past, Tracy also must follow her instincts --- to whatever dark and dangerous places they may lead.

For Sabrina Monroe, moving back home to the Wisconsin Dells means returning to the Monroe family curse: the women in her family can see spirits who come to them for help with unfinished business. Molly, a bubbly rom-com-loving ghost, stuck by Sabrina's side all through her lonely childhood. Her personal life starts looking up when Ray, the new local restaurateur, invites Sabrina to his supper club, where he flirts with her over his famous Brandy Old-Fashioneds. He's charming and handsome, but Sabrina tells herself she doesn't have time for romance --- she needs to focus on finding a job. Except the longer she's in the Dells, the harder it is to resist her feelings for Ray.

The Divide. It’s the edge of the universe. Now it’s collapsing --- and taking everyone and everything with it. The only ones who can stop it are the Sentinels --- the recruits, exiles and court-martialed dregs of the military. At the Divide, Adequin Rake commands the Argus. She has no resources, no comms --- nothing, except for the soldiers whom no one wanted. Her ace in the hole could be Cavalon Mercer --- genius and exiled prince who nuked his grandfather's genetic facility for “reasons.” She knows they’re humanity's last chance.

The city of Miami is Detective Tom Moon's backyard. He's always kept it local, attending University of Miami on a football scholarship, and, as a Miami PD officer, protecting the city's most vulnerable. Now, as the new leader of an FBI task force called "Operation Guardian," it's his mission to combat international crime. Moon's investigative team discovers that the opportunistic "Blood Brothers" --- Russian nationals Roman and Emile Rostoff --- have evaded authorities while building a vast, powerful and deadly crime syndicate throughout Europe and metropolitan Miami. Moon played offense for U of M, but he's on the other side of the field this time. And as the Rostoffs zero in on a target dear to Tom, they're not playing by anyone's rules.

All Maggie Bliss needs to do is write. Forty-eight years old and newly single (again!), she ventures to Paris in a last-ditch effort to finish her manuscript. With a marvelous apartment at her fingertips and an elegant housekeeper to meet her every need, a finished book --- and her dream of finally taking her career over the top --- is surely within her grasp. After all, how could she find anything except inspiration in Paris, with its sophistication, food and romance in the air? But the clock is running out, and between her charming ex-husband arriving in France for vacation and a handsome Frenchman appearing one morning in her bathtub, Maggie’s previously undisturbed peace goes by the wayside.

Hidden behind the Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms and cafeteria that are home to the museum's devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people --- along with a few ghosts. A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, METROPOLITAN STORIES unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself.

This powerful collection of short stories traces an emotional arc inspired by Madeleine L'Engle's early life and career, from her lonely childhood in New York to her life as a mother in small-town Connecticut. In a selection of 18 stories discovered by one of her granddaughters, we see how L'Engle's personal experiences and abiding faith informed the creation of her many cherished works. Some of these stories have never been published; others were refashioned into scenes for her novels and memoirs. Almost all were written in the 1940s and '50s, from L'Engle's college years until just before the publication of A WRINKLE IN TIME.

Fall in love. Get married. Turn to your female friends to be truly understood. Amanda and Sophie decide it’s time to flip the script. Why not spend their lives with each other and keep men on the side for fun, sex and occasionally fixing things around the house? They will rely on each other and give men the secondary role that they deserve. And much to their surprise, it actually works. They fix up a run-down brownstone and create the home they’ve always wanted. Soon, they have love and emotional support, as well as a wide variety of male “crushes” on the side. But when one of their crushes becomes something more, Amanda and Sophie must reconsider the life they’ve begun to build and how far they’re willing to go to keep it.

Investigating the killing of a prisoner during a riot inside a state penitentiary, GBI investigator Will Trent is confronted with disturbing information. One of the inmates claims that he is innocent of a brutal attack for which he has always been the prime suspect. The man insists that he was framed by a corrupt law enforcement team led by Jeffrey Tolliver and that the real culprit is still out there. If Will reopens the investigation and implicates the dead police officer with a hero’s reputation of wrongdoing, the opportunistic convict is willing to provide the information GBI needs about the riot murder. Only days ago, another young woman was viciously murdered in a state park in northern Georgia. Is it a fluke, or could there be a serial killer on the loose?

1876. In the glittering world of Manhattan's upper crust, women are valued by their pedigree, dowry and, most importantly, connections. They have few rights and even less independence --- what they do have is society. The more celebrated the hostess, the more powerful the woman. And none is more powerful than Caroline Astor --- the Mrs. Astor. But times are changing. Alva Vanderbilt has recently married into one of America's richest families. But what good is dizzying wealth when society refuses to acknowledge you? Alva, who knows what it is to have nothing, will do whatever it takes to have everything.

Alix Chamberlain is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young Black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, and a bystander films everything. At 25, Emira is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

Scarlett Clark is an exceptional English professor. But she’s even better at getting away with murder. Every year, she searches for the worst man at Gorman University and plots his well-deserved demise. Thanks to her meticulous planning, she’s avoided drawing attention to herself --- but as she’s preparing for her biggest kill yet, the school starts probing into the growing body count on campus. Determined to keep her enemies close, Scarlett insinuates herself into the investigation and charms the woman in charge, Dr. Mina Pierce. Everything is going according to her master plan…until she loses control with her latest victim, putting her secret life at risk of exposure.

Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in west Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive parents, John Cole and Thomas McNulty, whose story Sebastian Barry told in his acclaimed previous novel, DAYS WITHOUT END, she forges a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. Tennessee is a state still riven by the bitter legacy of the Civil War, and the fragile harmony of her family is soon threatened by a further traumatic event --- one that Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand.

When journalist Amelia Buxton discovers that a cluster of embryos belonging to her childhood friend Parker and his late wife Greer have been deemed “abandoned,” she’s put in the unenviable position of telling Parker --- and dredging up old wounds in the process. Parker has been unable to move forward since the loss of his beloved wife three years ago. He has all but forgotten about the frozen embryos. But once Amelia reveals her discovery, he knows that if he ever wants to get a part of Greer back, he’ll need to accept his fate as a single father and find a surrogate. Each dealing with their own private griefs, Parker and Amelia slowly begin to find solace in one another as they navigate an uncertain future against the backdrop of the pristine waters of their childhood home, Buxton Beach.

To this day, mention the name “Andy Warhol” to almost anyone, and you’ll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhol’s name, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that. In WARHOL, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. “The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was,” as Gopnik writes. “That’s why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure,” from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the “performance” of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardom --- and his attempted assassination.