At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, "North Toward Home," became a modern classic. In "The Courting of Marcus Dupree" he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called "southern."

Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since "the Troubles" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.

Britain's tennis players are often regarded as gallant losers and also-rans. There was a painful 76-year gap between the grand slam triumphs of Fred Perry and Andy Murray, and most Brits perennially fail to progress beyond the early rounds at Wimbledon. But in this first detailed account of Britain's place in world tennis from the Victorian period to the present day, historian Kevin Jefferys shows that British players have a surprisingly strong record. He traces the fluctuations in the nation's tennis fortunes - with barren spells counterbalanced by periods of ascendancy - and looks beyond the domestic obsession with Wimbledon to highlight British successes at other grand slam tournaments, in the Davis Cup and in Olympic tennis. The author also focuses on key individuals, providing fresh profiles of his selection of the best British players of all time: the men and women who have delivered most on the international stage, from the time of the Renshaw brothers in the 1880s to Andy and Jamie Murray today.

When Billie Jean King trounced Bobby Riggs in tennis's ""Battle of the Sexes"" in 1973, she placed sports squarely at the center of a national debate about gender equity. In this winning combination of biography and history, Susan Ware argues that King's challenge to sexism, the supportive climate of second-wave feminism, and the legislative clout of Title IX sparked a women's sports revolution in the 1970s that fundamentally reshaped American society. While King did not single-handedly cause the revolution in women's sports, she quickly became one of its most enduring symbols, as did Title IX, a federal law that was initially passed in 1972 to attack sex discrimination in educational institutions but had its greatest impact by opening opportunities for women in sports. King's place in tennis history is secure, and now, with Game, Set, Match, she can take her rightful place as a key player in the history of feminism as well. By linking the stories of King and Title IX, Ware explains why women's sports took off in the 1970s and demonstrates how giving women a sporting chance has permanently changed American life on and off the playing field.

A "Huffington Post" Best Book of the Year
There is no other writer at work today like the award-winning Geoff Dyer. Here he embarks on an investigation into Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker, " the masterpiece of cinema that has haunted him since he first saw it thirty years ago.

The hilarious, classic memoir of the international tennis circuit.

"A Handful of Summers" is a delightfully uninhibited insider's account of tennis on the international circuit in the fifties and sixties -- both on and off court -- in the glory days of Fred Perry, Roy Emerson, and Virginia Wade.

Forbes begins with his childhood on a farm in South Africa, where he learned to play tennis on a gravel court. His game takes him to Europe, as a South African Davis Cup player, and finally to Wimbledon. Along the way he cavorts with extraordinary characters among the world-class players, including a young Billy Jean King and Rod Laver -- and their tales, and his, shine throughout this irresistibly witty memoir. A cult classic among tennis aficionados when it was first published in the United States, it is a current bestseller in South Africa.