Books published by Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press

With The Lion Sleeps Tonight South Africa's answer to Hunter S. Thompson returns with his first book since the groundbreaking classic My Traitor's Heart.

The dramatic story of the rise of women's sports over the last century in a series of original narratives focusing on the great female athletes whose success has changed the game and paved the way for the women and girls of today. Photos throughout.

When award-winning journalist Dave Jamieson rediscovered his childhood baseball card collection he figured that now was the time to cash in on his "investments." But when he tried the card shops, they were nearly all gone, closed forever. eBay was no help, either. Baseball cards were selling for next to nothing. What had happened? In "Mint Condition," the first comprehensive history of this American icon, Jamieson finds the answers and much more. In the years after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping baseball cards into cigarette packs as collector's items, launching a massive advertising war. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes. In the 1930s, baseball cards helped gum and candy makers survive the Great Depression, and kept children in touch with the game. After World War II, Topps Chewing Gum Inc. built itself into an American icon, hooking a generation of baby boomers on bubble gum and baseball cards. In the 1960s, royalties from cards helped to transform the players' union into one of the country's most powerful, dramatically altering the business of the game. And in the '80s and '90s, cards went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a billion-dollar-a-year industry before all but disappearing. Brimming with colorful characters, this is a rollicking, century-spanning, and extremely entertaining history.

Chay Yew has been hailed by Time magazine as "a promising new voice in American theater." In this collection of four new plays, Yew continues to explore issues of artistic expression, self-identity, and the immigrant experience. In Red, a magical, mysterious drama set during China''s Cultural Revolution, a renowned actor stands his ground against a young revolutionary in a struggle that pits politics against free expression and one generation against another. Set in New York''s Chinatown, Scissors is a moving portrait of a weekly haircutting ritual between an elderly Chinese manservant and his Caucasian ex-employer. A Beautiful Country chronicles the turbulent history of Asians in America through the eyes of an immigrant drag queen, Miss Visa Denied. In Wonderland, a family working toward their American dream experiences dramatic and unexpected developments that threaten to shatter their hopes. Although aesthetically and tonally different from one another, Yew''s four plays evoke an epic backdrop to the dreams, loves, longings, and lives of Asians in America. "Yew ... demonstrates the ability to shock and enlighten by writing it straight. It makes for a vital evening of theatre." -- Back Stage West/Dram-Logue

Her third collection of poetry, Claudia Rankine's Plot is original and enchanting, and the language, as in her acclaimed The End of the Alphabet, never ceases to startle and confront. Plot is a postmodern dialogue about pregnancy and childbirth. Liv, the expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, find themselves propelled into one of our most basic plots -- boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. Liv's respect for life, however, makes her reluctant to bring a new life into the world. The couple's electrifying journey is charted through dreams, conversations, and reflections. A text like no other, it crosses genres, existing at times in poetry, at times in dialogue and prose, in order to arrive at new life and baby Ersatz. This stunning, avant-garde performance enacts what it means to be human, and to invest in humanity.

Acclaimed by Frank Rich as "a writer who illuminates the deepest dramas of American life with poetry and compassion," Lanford Wilson is one of the most esteemed contemporary American playwrights of our time. Nowhere is this more evident than in his latest play, "Book of Days," which has won the Best Play Award from the American Theater Critics Association. "Book of Days" is set in a small town dominated by a cheese plant, a fundamentalist church, and a community theater. When the owner of the cheese plant dies mysteriously in a hunting accident, Ruth, his bookkeeper, suspects murder. Cast as Joan of Arc in a local production of George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan, Ruth takes on the attributes of her fictional character and launches into a one-woman campaign to see justice done. In "Book of Days, " Lanford Wilson uses note-perfect language to create characters who are remarkable both for their comic turns and for their enormous depth. "Mr. Wilson's cosmic consciousness, intense moral concern, sense of human redemption and romantic effusion have climbed to a new peak." -- Alvin Klein, The New York Times; "A significant addition to the Lanford Wilson canon . . . his best work since Fifth of July . . . Book of Days manages to combine Wilson's signature character-based whimsy with an atypically strong narrative book and politically charged underpinnings." -- Chris Jones, Variety; "Book of Days is lively storytelling by one of our best playwrights." -- Lawrence DeVine, Detroit Free Press.

The screenplays of award-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley have earned him a reputation as a gifted writer with a great range and imagination. His movies Moonstruck, Five Corners, and Joe Versus the Volcano have starred such Hollywood luminaries as Cher—who took home an Oscar for her performance in Moonstruck—Nicolas Cage, Jodie Foster, John Turturro, Meg Ryan, and Tom Hanks. This collection showcases Shanley’s talent for creating dialogue that is true to his characters and his ability to tell their stories in eccentric and intensely humorous situations.

This superb bilingual anthology highlights the posthumous legacy of Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, who left a vast body of unpublished work when he died in 1973. Ben Belitt, a distinguished poet in his own right, is widely regarded as the leading translator of Neruda into English. Here he has given us a Neruda as fecund and engaged as ever, ceaselessly spinning the strands of his great, seamless life''s work.

Few artists have captured the emotional, sexual, and political chaos of modern urban life as perceptively as David Wojnarowicz, whom Out magazine has called "an acute observer of the unmapped region surrounding his heart and one of the best writers of his generation." In journal entries from age seventeen until his AIDS-related death at thirty-seven, In the Shadow of the American Dream chronicles the life of a radical artist who unequivocally defied bigotry even as he became a target for the right wing. It tells the story of Wojnarowicz's creative birth, from publishing his first photographs and writing what would become The Waterfront Journals to completing his tour de force, Close to the Knives, at the height of his fame. In the Shadow of the American Dream is finally a record of the private Wojnarowicz, falling in love, exploring erotic possibilities on the Hudson River piers, becoming overwhelmed by the demands of survival, and searching for the pleasure and freedom he believed one could live on.

Shacochis' first book in ten years spans five decades and travels from Haiti to Croatia, Istanbul, and the US in an epic masterwork that traces a global lineage of political, cultural, and personal tumult.

In his most important and commercial book since Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden draws on unprecedented access to the figures involved to produce the definitive account of the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

The seventh book in John Lawton's Inspector Troy series, selected by Time magazine as one of 'Six Detective Series to Savour' alongside Michael Connelly and Donna Leon.

Shinkichi Takahashi is one of the truly great figures in world poetry. In the classic Zen tradition of economy, disciplined attention, and subtlety, Takahashi lucidly captures that which is contemporary in its problems and experiences, yet classic in its quest for unity with the Absolute. Lucien Stryk, Takahashi''s fellow poet and close friend, here presents Takahashi''s complete body of Zen poems in an English translation that conveys the grace and power of Takahashi''s superb art. "A first-rate poet . . . [Takahashi] springs out of some crack between ordinary worlds: that is, there is some genuine madness of the sort striven for in Zen." -- Robert Bly; "We visit places in Takahashi that we once may have visited in a dream, or in a moment too startling to record the perception. . . . You need know nothing of Zen to become immersed in his work. You will inevitably know something of Zen when you emerge." -- Jim Harrison, American Poetry Review

The incredible story of Iridium - the most complex satellite system ever built, the cell phone of the future and one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in American history - and one man's desperate race to save it

The third book in John Lawton's Inspector Troy series, selected by Time magazine as one of 'Six Detective Series to Savour' alongside Michael Connelly and Donna Leon.

In a life that spanned the 20th century (1898-2003), Madame Chiang Kai-Shek was inextricably entwined with China's tempestuous evolution from the imperial Qing Dynasty to the end of colonialism in Hong Kong. In this first biography of one of history's most intriguing and controversial political figures, Li shows how Madame Chiang influenced decades of Sino-American relations and modern Chinese history.