Lace up and hit the books!
Sports fans may be missing the action right now so we’re bringing the sports to you. From baseball and hockey to football and mountain climbing, these reads will give you something to root for.


For Baseball Fans:

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: The ’69 Mets, New York City, and the Most Astounding Season in Baseball History by Wayne Coffey

“A must-read for not just for Mets fans, but all baseball fans who will appreciate what indeed was the most astounding season in baseball history.”—Ken Rosenthal, two-time Sports Emmy winner for Outstanding Sports Reporter

The story of the 1969 New York Mets’ season has long since entered sports lore as one of the most remarkable of all time. But beyond the “miracle” is a compelling narrative of an unlikely collection of players and the hallowed manager who inspired them to greatness. For the fiftieth anniversary, renowned sports journalist Wayne Coffey brings to life a moment when a championship could descend on a city like magic, and when a baseball legend was authored one inning at a time.

As the Mets powered through the season to reach a World Series against the best-in-a-generation Baltimore Orioles, Hodges’s steady hand guided a team that had very recently been the league laughingstock to an improbable, electrifying shot at sports immortality.

Available in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches by Tyler Kepner

From the New York Times baseball columnist, an enchanting, enthralling history of the national pastime as told through the craft of pitching, based on years of archival research and interviews with more than three hundred people from Hall of Famers to the stars of today.

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: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, Tyler Kepner traces the colorful stories and fascinating folklore behind the ten major pitches. Each chapter highlights a different pitch, from the blazing fastball to the fluttering knuckleball to the slippery spitball. Infusing every page with infectious passion for the game, Kepner brings readers inside the minds of combatants sixty feet, six inches apart.

Available in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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For Hockey Fans:

Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other by Ken Dryden

In Scotty, Dryden has given his coach a new test: Tell us about all these players and teams you’ve seen, but imagine yourself as their coach. Tell us about their weaknesses, not just their strengths. Tell us how you would coach them and coach against them. And then choose the top eight teams of all time, match them up against one another in a playoff series, and, separating the near-great from the great, tell us who would win. And why.

Scotty Bowman is recognized as the best coach in hockey history, and one of the greatest coaches in all of sports. He won more games and more Stanley Cups than anyone else. Remarkably, despite all the changes in hockey, he coached at the very top for more than four decades, his first Cup win and his last an astonishing thirty-nine years apart. Yet perhaps most uniquely, different from anyone else who has ever lived or ever will again, he has experienced the best of hockey continuously since he was fourteen years old.

Ken Dryden was a Hall-of-Fame goaltender with the Montreal Canadiens. His critically acclaimed and bestselling books have shaped the way we read and think about hockey.

Now the player and coach who won five Stanley Cups together team up once again.

Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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99: Stories of the Game by Wayne Gretzky

“The Great One” weaves memories of his legendary career with an inside look at the sport of professional hockey, and the heroes and stories that inspired him.

From minor-hockey phenomenon to Hall of Fame sensation, Wayne Gretzky rewrote the record books, his accomplishments becoming the stuff of legend. Dubbed “The Great One,” he is considered by many to be the greatest hockey player who ever lived. No one has seen more of the game than he has—but he has never discussed in depth just what it was he saw.

For the first time, Gretzky discusses candidly what the game looks like to him and introduces us to the people who inspired and motivated him: mentors, teammates, rivals, the famous and the lesser known. Weaving together lives and moments from an extraordinary career, he reflects on the players who inflamed his imagination when he was a kid, the way he himself figured in the dreams of so many who came after; takes us onto the ice and into the dressing rooms to meet the friends who stood by him and the rivals who spurred him to greater heights; shows us some of the famous moments in hockey history through the eyes of someone who regularly made that history.

Available in Harcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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For Football Fans:

NFL Century: The One-Hundred-Year Rise of America’s Greatest Sports League by Joe Horrigan

From the former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame comes a sweeping and lively history of the National Football League.

The NFL has come a long way from its founding in Canton, Ohio, in 1920. In the hundred years since that fateful day, football has become America’s most popular and lucrative professional sport. The former scrappy upstart league that struggled to stay afloat has survived a host of challenges—the Great Depression and World War II, controversies and scandals, battles over labor rights and competition from rival leagues—to produce American icons like Vince Lombardi, Joe Montana, and Tom Brady. It is an extraordinary and entertaining history that could be told only by Joe Horrigan, former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and perhaps the greatest living historian of the NFL, by drawing upon decades of NFL archives. Compelling, eye-opening, and authoritative, NFL Century is a must-read for NFL fans and anyone who loves the game of football.

Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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For Basketball Fans:

Basketball: A Love Story by Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew and Dan Klores

Inspired by a major ESPN film series, this is an extraordinary oral history of basketball—its eye-opening untold history, its profound deeper meaning, its transformative influence on the world—as told through an unprecedented series of candid conversations with the game’s ultimate icons.

This is the greatest love story never told. This is the true story of basketball. It is the story of a Canadian invention that took over America, and the world. Of a supposed “white man’s sport” that became a way for people of color, women, and immigrants to claim a new place in society. Of a game that demands everything of those who love it, yet gives so much back in return.

To tell this story, acclaimed journalists Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew and Dan Klores embarked on a groundbreaking mission to interview a staggering lineup of basketball trailblazers. For the first time hundreds of legends, from Kobe, Lebron and Steph Curry to Magic Johnson, Dr. J and Jerry West, spoke movingly about their greatest passion. Former NBA commissioner David Stern and iconic coaches like Phil Jackson and Coach K opened up like never before. Those who shattered glass ceilings, from Bill Russell and Yao Ming to Cheryl Miller and Lisa Leslie, explained what it really took to lay claim to their place in the game.

Available in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season by John Feinstein

Thirty years ago after changing the sports book landscape with his mega-hit, A Season on the Brink, #1 New York Times bestselling author John Feinstein returns to his first love—college basketball—with a fascinating and compelling journey through a landscape of unsung, unpublicized and often unknown heroes of Division-1 college hoops.

John Feinstein has already taken readers into the inner circles of top college basketball programs in The Legends Club. This time, Feinstein pulls back the curtain on college basketball’s lesser-known Cinderella stories—the smaller programs who no one expects to win, who have no chance of attracting the most coveted high school recruits, who rarely send their players on to the NBA.

Feinstein follows a handful of players, coaches, and schools who dream, not of winning the NCAA tournament, but of making it past their first or second round games. Every once in a while, one of these coaches or players is plucked from obscurity to continue on to lead a major team or to play professionally, cementing their status in these fiercely passionate fan bases as a legend. These are the gifted players who aren’t handled with kid gloves–they’re hardworking, gritty teammates who practice and party with everyone else.

With his trademark humor and invaluable connections, John Feinstein reveals the big time programs you’ve never heard of, the bracket busters you didn’t expect to cheer for, and the coaches who inspire them to take their teams to the next level.

Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever by Jack McCallum

Acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum delivers the untold story of the greatest team ever assembled: the 1992 U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball Team.

As a writer for Sports Illustrated, McCallum enjoyed a courtside seat for the most exciting basketball spectacle on earth, covering the Dream Team from its inception to the gold medal ceremony in Barcelona. Drawing on fresh interviews with the players, McCallum provides the definitive account of the Dream Team phenomenon. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at the controversial selection process. He takes us inside the team’s Olympic suites for late-night card games and bull sessions where superstars like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird debated the finer points of basketball. And he narrates a riveting account of the legendary intrasquad scrimmage that pitted the Dream Teamers against one another in what may have been the greatest pickup game in history. In the twenty years since the Dream Team first captivated the world, its mystique has only grown. Dream Team vividly re-creates the moment when a once-in-a-millennium group of athletes came together and changed the future of sports—one perfectly executed fast break at a time.

Available in Trade Paperback and eBook Editions.

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For Soccer Fans:

Why Soccer Matters: A Look at More Than Sixty Years of International Soccer by Pelé

“I know in my heart that soccer was good to me, and great to the world . . . I saw, time and again, how the sport improved countless millions of lives, both on and off the field. For me, at least, that’s why soccer matters.” —Pelé

The world’s most popular sport goes by many names—soccer, football, the beautiful game—but fans have always agreed on one thing: The greatest player of all time was Pelé. Before Messi, before Ronaldo, before Beckham, Pelé had a stunning twenty-year career, where he was heralded as an international treasure. His accomplishments on the field proved to be pure magic: an unprecedented three World Cup championships and the all-time scoring record, with 1,283 goals. Since retiring, he has traveled the world as soccer’s global ambassador, relentlessly promoting the positive ways soccer can transform young men and women, struggling communities, even entire nations.

For the first time, the legendary star and humanitarian explores the sport’s recent history and provides new insights into the game. With unparalleled openness, he shares his most inspiring experiences, heartwarming stories, and hard-won wisdom. This is Pelé’s legacy, his way of passing on everything he’s learned and inspiring a new generation. In Why Soccer Matters, Pelé details his ambitious goals for the future of the sport and, by extension, the world.

Available in Trade Paperback and eBook Editions.

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Masters of Modern Soccer: How the World’s Best Play the Twenty-First-Century Game by Grant Wahl

The most in-depth analysis of the craft of soccer ever written for the American fan. For any fan, player, coach, or sideline enthusiast, this book will change the way they watch the game.

In Masters of Modern SoccerSports Illustrated writer Grant Wahl asks: How do some of the game’s smartest figures master the craft of soccer? By profiling players in every key position (American phenomenon Christian Pulisic, Mexican superstar Javier “Chicharito” Hernández, Belgium’s Vincent Kompany, Spain’s Xabi Alonso, Germany’s Manuel Neuer) and management (Belgium coach Roberto Martínez and Borussia Dortmund sporting director Michael Zorc), Wahl reveals how elite players and coaches strategize on and off the field and execute in high pressure game situations.

Masters of Modern Soccer is the definitive thinking fan’s guide to modern soccer. For a supporter of any team, from the U.S. national teams to Manchester United, or any competition, from Mexico’s Liga MX to the World Cup, this book reveals what players and managers are thinking before, during, and after games and delivers a true behind-the-scenes perspective on the inner workings of the sport’s brightest minds.

Available in Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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For Extreme Sports Fans:

The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and The Climbing Life by Mark Synnott

A deeply reported insider perspective of Alex Honnold’s historic achievement and the culture and history of climbing.

In Mark Synnott’s unique window on the ethos of climbing, his friend Alex Honnold’s astonishing free solo ascent of El Capitan’s 3,000 feet of sheer granite is the central act. When Honnold topped out at 9:28 A.M. on June 3, 2017, having spent fewer than four hours on his historic ascent, the world gave a collective gasp. The New York Times described it as “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.” Synnott’s personal history of his own obsession with climbing since he was a teenager—through professional climbing triumphs and defeats, and the dilemmas they render—makes this a deeply reported, enchanting revelation about living life to the fullest. What are we doing if not an impossible climb?

Synnott delves into a raggedy culture that emerged decades earlier during Yosemite’s Golden Age, when pioneering climbers like Royal Robbins and Warren Harding invented the sport that Honnold would turn on its ear. Painting an authentic, wry portrait of climbing history and profiling Yosemite heroes and the harlequin tribes of climbers known as the Stonemasters and the Stone Monkeys, Synnott weaves in his own experiences with poignant insight and wit.

Available in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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For Runners:

26 Marathons: What I Learned About Faith, Identity, Running, and Life from My Marathon Career by Meb Keflezighi and Scott Douglas

A world-class runner and four-time Olympian shares the life lessons he’s learned from each of the twenty-six marathons he’s run in his storied career. 

When Meb Keflezighi—the first person in history to win both the Boston and New York City marathons as well as an Olympic marathon medal—ran his final marathon in New York City on November 5, 2017, it marked the end of an extraordinary distance-running career.

Meb’s last marathon was also his twenty-sixth, and each of those marathons has come with its own unique challenges, rewards, and outcomes. In 26 Marathons, Meb takes readers on those legendary races, along every hill, bend, and unexpected turn of events that made each marathon an exceptional learning experience, and a fascinating story.

Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.

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