The signs of the sports apocalypse are everywhere: Terrell Owens roams our streets a free man, the U.S. Congress is sampling sluggers’ urine tests; and worst of all, Americans are starting to take bicycle racing and soccer seriously. So who dares to step into the breach that separates sport from madness? The intrepid news team of The Brushback, the Internet’s most trusted and honored sports journal.* For intelligent fans (and by that, we mean those who read books–or at least the back covers) who are fed up with end-zone celebrations, inane sportscasters, luxury boxes, and eleven-dollar bleacher dogs, The Brushback Report will be chin-music to your ears. So put down the remote, Sparky, and pick up this book to get the real stories behind the hottest news headlines of our times: “Nation’s Jobless Receive Emergency Airlift of Madden 2006” “WNBA Players Give Up Trying to Be Sexy” “Hockey Surpassed in Popularity by Air Hockey” “New Girlfriend Weirded Out by Derek Jeter Fanpage” “Team with Lots of Heart Beaten by Team with Lots of Money” There’s no sporting cliché too trite and no inspiring story too corny to lampoon. From team owners on down to the guy who pirates Wrestlemania off cable TV, nothing or no one is spared the Brushback treatment. Hilarious and defiantly politically incorrect, The Brushback Report gives us the world of sports in all its demented glory. * Not really. We’re just pumping up our stats before the start of contract renegotiations.

Chicago’s V. I. Warshawski confronts crooked politicians and buried family secrets in this gritty mystery from New York Times bestselling author Sara Paretsky. No one would accuse V. I. Warshawski of backing down from a fight, but she’d happily avoid tangling with Chicago political bosses. Yet that’s what she ends up doing when she responds to a plea for help from an old high school flame, Frank Guzzo. Frank’s mother Stella was convicted of killing his kid sister, but now that she’s out of prison, she’s looking for exoneration. Even though the Warshawskis and Stella never got along, V. I. agrees to make a few inquiries after she sees how hard life has been on Frank and her other childhood friends. Only, that small favor leads her straight into the vipers’ nest of Illinois politics—and soon her main question isn’t about Stella’s case but whether or not she’ll make it out of this investigation alive... A Washington Post Best Mystery of 2015 Includes a Bonus Short Story!

The definitive work on the language of baseball—one of the “Five Best Baseball Books” (Wall Street Journal). Hailed as “a staggering piece of scholarship” (Wall Street Journal) and “an indispensable guide to the language of baseball” (San Diego Union-Tribune), The Dickson Baseball Dictionary has become an invaluable resource for those who love the game. Drawing on dozens of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, as well as contemporary sources, Dickson’s brilliant, illuminating definitions trace the earliest appearances of terms both well known and obscure. This edition includes more than 10,000 terms with 18,000 individual entries, and more than 250 photos. This “impressively comprehensive” (The Nation) book will delight everyone from the youngest fan to the hard-core aficionado.