I don’t read football books on Super Bowl Sunday or basketball books during March Madness. But the World Series invokes one hundred years of tradition, so I always watch it with the sound off and with something to read pregame, postgame, and during rain delays. Here are seven World Series books I’ve read, reread, and will read again. A Day in the Bleachers by Arnold Hano In 1954, Arnold Hano, a staff writer for Sport magazine and one of the stellar names of the golden age of American sports writing, decided to go to a World Series game. He went

The sparsely populated mile-high plains, bowl-shaped valleys, and jagged mountain ranges of Wyoming, Montana, and other western states inspire a particular literary shape and substance. A robust and increasingly influential literature of the West, with its own set of icons—Bret Harte, Walter van Tilburg Clark, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner—has evolved over the past century and a half.

The Zen master D. T. Suzuki defines satori as “the acquiring of a new point of view in our dealings with life and the world.” With satori, he writes, “our entire surroundings are viewed from quite an unexpected angle of perception.” Jack Kerouac opens his 1966 book Satori in Paris with a description of his own revelatory experience: “Somewhere during my ten days in Paris . . . I received an illumination of some kind that seems to’ve changed me again, towards what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese

Much contemporary poetry gets written off as too “experimental”—perhaps because of how crazy the poems look on the page, because they’re full of fragmentary images and half-finished thoughts, because they’re slathered in irony, or because they take poetry itself as their subject. Yet many of the most off-the-wall poets are actually writing about the same things—parenthood, love, sex, the environment, and the joys of literature—as their more straightforward contemporaries but have chosen to describe experience using untraditional means. Here are a few great books that embrace the experimental side of poetry. Like Wind Loves a Window by Andrea Baker This

College has proved so reliable a setting for fiction that it’s even laid claim to its own literary genre. But what happens after the campus novel graduates? The transition out of college is a much sadder, much less circumscribed, and, despite classic treatments by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mary McCarthy, much less popular novelistic subject than college itself. The following books tackle (or, in The Rules of Attraction and Privilege, are born of) postcollegiate malaise, each revealing the downside of what Amory Blaine termed “aristocratic egotism”—the darkest hour of the privileged youth. English, August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee

The narrator of my novel in progress has a storefront preacher mother and a family legacy of extremism that seem, the more she struggles against them, destined to determine her future. While her life goes in a very different direction from mine, I’ve taken quite a bit of material from my own experiences and neuroses in imagining her story. I’m a doubter by nature—committedly, almost compulsively so—and gravitate toward works by other agnostics. Skepticism is as old as faith, and its manifestations are complex and varied. Ecclesiastes By far the most heretical book of the Bible, this candid, downbeat, and

In Preston Sturges’s film Sullivan’s Travels (1941), convicts get a break from the woes of the Depression and chain-gang life at a screening of the Walt Disney cartoon “Playful Pluto.” Now, just in time for the current economic crisis, comes Disney’s first traditional animated feature in five years, The Princess and the Frog, due in theaters at the end of this year. With a New Orleans setting—and jazz-loving alligators, Cajun fireflies, and voodoo priestesses—the film promises to heal whatever post-Katrina wounds The Curious Case of Benjamin Button neglected. The following five books, meanwhile, are for the more cynical and knowing

While there are countless autobiographies by writers who have lost their sanity, memoirs of schizophrenia are a rarer breed. In moments of florid psychosis, schizophrenics can become so self-conscious about how they use words that they lose the ability to communicate. Everyday phrases seem unfamiliar, threatening, or absurd. As the psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch wrote, “The poet is a master of language, the schizophrenic is a slave to it.” Below is a list of six memoirs by writers who reveal the limits of language by chronicling their descent into madness. Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830-1832 by John

Odile by Raymond Queneau The narrator in this novel runs with two gangs: a group of petty criminals who spend their days playing cards and hanging out at the racetrack, and a cultlike band of revolutionaries who aim to “bring about the liberation of the Mind and of the proletariat” by strolling the Paris streets, […]