Wimbledon has long stood at the pinnacle of British and world tennis. But, as Kevin Jefferys shows in this ground-breaking new study, Britain has a rich history of international standard play beyond SW19, in top-level tournaments and Davis Cup competitions at iconic venues such as Queen's Club, Eastbourne and Edgbaston. The book traces the fluctuating fortunes of a dozen or so tournaments that have brought the world's finest players to English shores during the 140-year history of lawn tennis. Taking a tour around different regions of the country, the author sheds fresh light on the best-known events and on largely forgotten but once high-profile tournaments held in Bristol, Torquay and Scarborough. Both a record and a celebration of England's tennis heritage, the book is packed with stories about memorable players and matches, full results for singles finals and anecdotes about quirky or controversial incidents, ranging from the courtside fire that halted a tournament final to the anti-apartheid protests that disrupted a Davis Cup tie.

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.

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.

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.