In this novel, the careers of a golden boy rookie hitter for the Cubs and a hard-hitting Mets pitcher take very different paths. The baseball is thrilling, but it is what happens off the field that makes this story a classic.

In Brooklyn in the late 1940s, adolescent Michael Devlin is a dutiful son to his widowed mother and a conscientious altar boy at the parish church. One day, he meets Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a chance encounter that inaugurates a friendship with vast consequences, good and bad, for both of them. Michael lost his father in the war, and the rabbi, a recent immigrant to this country, lost his wife. The threads of their connection widen and strengthen as the...

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film starring Robert Redford) now in a new edition
Introduction by Kevin Baker
The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first—and some would say still the best—novel ever written about baseball.
In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material—the

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Cam uses her photographic memory to identify the person who stole a valuable autographed baseball.

When his Little League team gets a coach who knows nothing about baseball, seventh grader Corey is dismayed to see the team taken over by the coach's pushy twelve-year-old granddaughter.

Pip's two grandmothers, who cannot agree on anything, take over coaching her baseball team and create chaos.

A boy becomes a phenomenal baseball player one summer when a mysterious stranger resembling Babe Ruth befriends him.

"An average kid with an above average talent for predicting baseball pitches tries to help his favorite player out of a slump"--

Dani and Eric have been best friends since Dani moved next door in second grade--until one summer when everything changes.