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Having just returned from my first baseball game of the year (the Mets vs. the Nationals), the American pastime is on my mind. Back in 2004 I posted a list of my favorite baseball books, and to this day Philip Roth’s dark comedy The Great American Novel remains at the top of my list.

For a chance at winning this book and a 0 Threadless gift certificate, leave a comment with your favorite baseball book, movie, or player.

One winner, chosen randomly from the commenters, will receive the following prizes:

Philip Roth’s novel The Great American Novel

A 0 Threadless gift certificate to buy book-related t-shirts like Storytellers, The Best Channels Since 1465, Fahrenheit 451, Brainy Rainbow, or Word!, and music-related t-shirts like Death Note, Funkalicious, Music Snob, or anything else that catches your fancy.

If you have already have this book or it doesn’t interest you, I am happy to substitute a second 0 Threadless gift certificate for them.

The winner will be chosen randomly at midnight ET Friday evening (April 26th).

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous and ongoing contests at Largehearted Boy

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (my yearly reading series)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week’s new comics)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
Daily Downloads (daily free and legal music downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (highlights of the week’s book releases)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily links from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture)

Largehearted Boy

There’s no truth to the vicious rumor that I select candidates for my New Treasures column based solely on awesome cover art.

I also have to be able to get my hands on a copy. That’s two criteria, which I figure gives me a balanced approach.

Which brings us to today’s special guest, Up the Bright River by Philip Jose Farmer, a short story collection edited by Gary K. Wolfe. And its awesome wraparound cover, courtesy of Bob Eggleton (click for even awesomer high-res version).

Like a lot of 70s science fiction fans, I first discovered Philip Jose Farmer through his Hugo Award winning Riverworld series, particularly To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which I read and re-read, and The Fabulous Riverboat, which was even better.

The premise, that an unknown alien race has built a massive world with a single great river and resurrected everyone who had ever lived  on the shores of that river, was brilliantly inventive, and boggled my 12-year old mind.

“You are in this book, so is everyone else who has ever lived,” read the jacket copy. If I could write jacket copy like that, I’d be typing this from a gold-plated keyboard.

Farmer made his later reputation with his many SF series, including Riverworld, World of Tiers, Dayworld, Khokarsa (which we recently covered here), his Tarzan, Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban books, and others.

But he made his early reputation with his groundbreaking short stories. He won his first Hugo Award in 1953 (for “Most Promising New Talent”) for his second published story, the groundbreaking novella “The Lovers,” (Startling Stories, August 1952) the tale of a man in a sexual relationship with an extraterrestrial. It is frequently credited with being the story that broke the taboo against sex in science fiction.

His second Hugo came in 1968, for his novella “Riders of the Purple Wage,” from Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology.

Up the Bright River is the first collection of Farmer’s work since his death in 2009. It contains 15 short stories and novellas, from the 1950s space adventures he published in Amazing Stories, Worlds of IF, Galaxy, and others, to his last three Riverworld tales.

They include his dark fantasy “Father’s in the Basement” (1972), a Gothic horror tale from Orbit 11; “Extracts from the Memoir of Lord Greystoke” (1974), which he claimed to have merely edited; the first of the Father Carmody stories, “Attitudes,” from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1953), “Down in the Black Gang,” from World of IF (1969), and the memorably titled “St. Francis Kisses His Ass Goodbye,” from Semiotext(e) SF (1989); and ten others.

Up the Bright River is 333 pages in hardcover from Subterranean Press. It was published in December 2010 with a cover price of , and gets my highest recommendation.

And not just because of the awesome cover.

Black Gate

At KCRW, stream Neko Case and Nick Cave’s cover of the Zombies’ “She’s Not There.”

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The Financial Times profiles author Philip Roth.

“For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that, I was a boy, I didn’t find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam war. I started to try to write the book that became American Pastoral back in the 1970s, when the war was just ending, but I couldn’t do it. It took another 20 years. I wouldn’t know what to write [about Iraq and Afghanistan, or 9/11]. It does take me 20 years to figure it out.”

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I am aggregating online summer reading lists.

Today’s updates to the master list include the Book Lady’s Blog’s women’s studies books, the Irish Times’ list, and several others.

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The 2011 Bonnaroo downloads and streams page has been updated with videos of full sets by the Arcade Fire, Best Coast, Explosions in the Sky, Florence and the Machine, Grace Potter, Kylesa, and the School of Seven Bells.

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The Passive Voice examines what J.K. Rowling’s choice to sell her Harry Potter ebooks independently will have on indie authors.

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Backbeat interviews Bill Callahan about his new album Apocalypse and the nature of collaboration.

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Vol. 1 Brooklyn interviews singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler about books.

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Centro-matic frontman Will Johnson talks to All Things Considered about the band’s new album, Candidate Waltz.

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The Literateur interviews author Zadie Smith.

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At Reverb, actor Tim Robbins shares a list of the 30 most played songs in his iTunes library.

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The Boston Globe interviews singer-songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull.

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Mashable profiles the collaborative album review site MusicGrid.me, calling it a “Yelp for music.”

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Marketplace interviews Alina Simone about her music and new essay collection, You Must Go and Win.

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Cool Tools lists the best magazine articles ever.

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At Vulture, Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis shares his ideal 154-track summer playlist.

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State lists its albums of the year so far.

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Follow me on Twitter and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (news and links from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture)

Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week’s new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (highlights of the week’s new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

Fantasy Book Critic