With a power serve of 129 miles per hour and countless titles to her name (including number one in the world), Venus Williams is an incredible force in the world of tennis. She stands 6'1" and possesses great reach, or "wingspan," and a rare mental tenacity that has put many, many trophies on her mantelpiece. It was thanks to Williams' tireless campaigning that the bizarre sexist tradition of awarding a smaller prize money to female tennis players was corrected, at least at Wimbledon and at the French Open. (Amusingly, Williams herself became the first beneficiary of this amendment when she won Wimbledon in June, 2007.) Williams' ascent to fame has been meteoric from the first. At her Grand Slam debut at the 1997 French Open, she reached the final, and although she did not win that match, her world ranking shot up from 66 to 25 in one day. By 1999, she was number three, and by 2000 she had won a gold medal for the U.S. at the Olympics--the first of two, thus far. This sense of un-stoppability has always characterized Venus Williams, and makes her gripping to watch. Now the British fashion photographer Koto Bolofo has caught some of her magic on camera, in ways that have never been seen before. Granted unrivalled access to the athlete, during both her public tournaments and many private moments, Bolofo offers here a monumental portrait of a one of today's greatest athletes.

Can tennis really be this simple?.

Just ask the dozens of world-class players who have made it to the top using Oscar Wegners groundbreaking approach. But if playing tennis isnt so easy for you, if you never seem to play up to your potential, dont blame yourselfblame the coach who taught you a lot of uselessly complex techniques. "Play Better Tennis in 2 Hours" is your guide to tennis as the pros play itmore intuitive, more fluid, and more fun. World-renowned tennis coach and ESPN commentator Oscar Wegner shows you how to focus your efforts on one thinghitting the ball correctly. Your own natural athleticism will take care of everything else. Follow the simple drills in this power-packed handbook, and youll learn how to: . . Move to the ball efficiently and fluidly. Stop worrying about foot position and stance. Hit every stroke harder and more accurately. Put a wicked topspin on your forehand. Master both one- and two-handed backhands. Combine control and power on your volleys. Put more speed and spin into your serve and more punch in your return. .

"Known and respected all around the world, Oscar has given us another great contribution to tennis with this book."Gustavo Kuerten, three-time French Open champion.

"Oscar has broken the mold, demystifying the modern tennis stroke. There's genius in his analysis of pro techniquesthe dynamics of what the racquet does to the ball, how power and spin are added. He understands how top pros really stroke the ball, and always have, all the way back to Tilden."Andy Rosenberg, Director for NBC Sports Wimbledon and the French Open.

Oscar Wegner is an internationally known professional tennis coach, ESPN commentator, and former tourplayer. He was the first tennis coach to identify and document the staggering disparities between the simple, fluid game played by the pros and the rigid, overchoreographed techniques taught to new players. Oscar has dedicated himself for more than twenty years to sharing his proven techniques both with new players and with those whose natural abilities have been hobbled by poor instruction. He can be reached at www.tennisteacher.com.

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.

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.

Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, and Bill Tilden were the legendary quartet of the "Golden Age of Sports" in the 1920s. They transformed their respective athletic disciplines and captured the imagination of a nation. The indisputable force behind the emergence of professional tennis as a popular and lucrative sport, Tilden's on-court accomplishments are nothing short of staggering. The first American-born player to win Wimbledon and a seven-time winner of the U.S. singles championship, he was the number 1 ranked player for ten straight years. A tall, flamboyant player with a striking appearance, Tilden didn't just play; he performed with a singular style that separated him from other top athletes. Tilden was a showman off the court as well. He appeared in numerous comedies and dramas on both stage and screen and was a Renaissance man who wrote more than two dozen fiction and nonfiction books, including several successful tennis instructions books. But Tilden had a secret-one he didn't fully understand himself. After he left competitive tennis in the late 1940s, he faced a lurid fall from grace when he was arrested after an incident involving an underage boy in his car. Tilden served seven months in prison and later attempted to explain his questionable behavior to the public, only to be ostracized from the tennis circuit. Despite his glorious career in tennis, his final years were much constrained and lived amid considerable public shunning. Tilden's athletic accomplishments remain, as he is arguably the best American player ever. American Colossus is a thorough account of his life, bringing a much-needed look back at one of the world's greatest athletes and a person whose story is as relevant as ever.