A highly illustrated, beautifully designed tribute to ping pong, the world's most popular yet least appreciated sport—with tales from the table by Nick Hornby, Will Shortz, Davy Rothbart, Harold Evans, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others. Every sport claims to be the world's game—soccer, basketball, kabaddi. But none can match the global status acquired by modest, ubiquitous ping pong—the most popular yet misunderstood pastime in the world today, a sleeping giant of fast-paced fun. Join us on a journey into the dark corners and distant alleys of this ponging globe, from suburban basements of misspent youths to Bangkok backrooms to New Jersey rec rooms to Beijing stadia to dwarf child champions to elderly enthusiasts to Hollywood hipsters to perky porn stars. This cast of thousands, combined with artifacts from the authors' ever-growing collection of ping pongalia, reveals the hidden truths of the world behind the game: the secrets of eternal youth, guerrilla warfare, foolproof seduction, fame and adulation—all explained through two paddles, sixty inches of net, and a bouncing, bouncing ball. A world where everything you know is pong. *Please note: some images contained in this book are of an adult nature.

Everything You Know Is Pong: How Mighty Table Tennis Shapes Our World

History

Bennett, Roger

HOROWITZ, ELI

World

It Books

The Silent History

Moffett, Kevin

Derby, Matthew

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Vintage

An innovative story of love, decapitation, cryogenics, and memory by two of our most creative literary minds The New World is the story of a marriage. Dr. Jane Cotton is a pediatric surgeon; her husband, Jim, is a humanist chaplain. They are about to celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary when Jim suddenly collapses and dies. When Jane arrives at the hospital, she is horrified to find that her husband's head has been removed from his body. Only then does she discover that he secretly enrolled with a shadowy cryogenics company called Polaris. Furious and grieving, Jane fights to reclaim Jim from Polaris. Revived in the future, Jim learns that he must sacrifice every memory of Jane if he wants to stay alive in the new world. Separated by centuries, each of them is challenged to choose between love and fear, intimacy and solitude, life and grief, and each will find an answer to the challenge that is surprising, harrowing, and ultimately beautiful.

The New World: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Adrian, Chris

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A generation of children forced to live without words. 
It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own. 
The Silent History unfolds in a series of brief testimonials from parents, teachers, friends, doctors, cult leaders, profiteers, and impostors (everyone except, of course, the children themselves), documenting the growth of the so-called silent community into an elusive, enigmatic force in itself―alluring to some, threatening to others. Both a bold storytelling experiment and a propulsive reading experience, Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, and Kevin Moffett's The Silent History is at once thrilling, timely, and timeless.

Silent History, The

FSG Originals

“The Pickle Index is full of life and everything else―it’s rowdy and sweaty and heartbreaking, and by heartbreaking I mean funny, and by funny I mean laugh-until-you’re-exhausted-and-leaking-and-hungry.” ―Miranda July
Zloty Kornblatt is the hapless ringmaster of an even more hapless circus troupe. But one fateful night, Zloty makes a mistake: he accidentally makes his audience laugh. Here on the outskirts of Burford―where both the cuisine and the economy, such as they are, are highly dependent on pickled vegetables―laughter is a rare occasion. It draws the immediate attention of the local bureaucracy, and by morning Zloty has been branded an instigator, conspirator, and fomentor sentenced to death or worse. His only hope lies with his dysfunctional troupe―a morose contortionist, a strongman who’d rather be miming, a lion tamer paired with an elderly dog―a ragged band of misfits and failures who must somehow spring Zloty from his cell at the top of the Confinement Needle. Their arcane skills become strangely useful, and unlikely success follows unlikely success. Until, suddenly, the successes end―leaving only Flora Bialy, Zloty’s understudy and our shy narrator, to save the day.
Punctuated with evocative woodcuts by Ian Huebert, Eli Horowitz's The Pickle Index is a fast-moving fable, full of deadpan humor and absurd twists―and an innovative, exhilarating storytelling experience.

The Pickle Index: A Novel

Jorie has just received some terrible news. A phone full of missed calls and sympathetic text messages seems to indicate that her husband, Jim, a chaplain at the hospital where she works as a surgeon, is dead. Only, not quite--rather, his head has been removed from his body and cryogenically frozen. Jim awakes to find himself in an altogether unique situation, to say the least: his body gone but his consciousness alive, his only companion a mysterious disembodied voice.
In this surreal and unexpectedly moving work, Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz spin a tale of loss and adjustment, death and reawakening. Simultaneously fabulist and achingly human, The New World finds Jorie grieving the husband she knew while Jim wrestles with the meaning of life after death. Conceived in collaboration with Atavist Books, The New World investigates the meaning of love and loss in the digital era.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Maya is a 20-year-old with a graveyard shift at the post office, a Ma whose temper rises even faster than the rent, and a million headaches that come with life as a woman of color in New York City. Her escape from it all is her local arcade, home to New York's feisty, burgeoning fighting game tournament scene. But when she's banned for standing up to a trash-talker, even the arcade is taken away. Maya needs to partner with a team of up-and-coming players and learn to defeat not just her opponents, but also her own worst instincts. Beneath Maya's quest for FGC glory shines a deeper story about how all of us are made by history--and how we can make history in our turn. "Bodied" is a unique coming-of-age story with sneaky literary chops, a modern mash-up between "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and "A League of Their Own."

Bodied

Genre Fiction

BookBaby

Knife throwers. Ominous fortresses. Angry mimes. Snack festivals. Morose contortionists. Guillotines. Smiling journalists. Lonely young women. Lingering hope. Incompetence. Desperation. Funny disguises. Plus two hardcover books in a gold-encrusted slipcase, twenty full-color illustrations, and an unprecedented feat of interactive book design. A hapless circus troupe tours the countryside of a downtrodden nation, trying to earn a living the best way they know even though their best isn't very good at all: a morose contortionist, a strongman who'd rather be miming, a lion tamer paired with an elderly dog, etc. Toward the end of a typically glum performance, Zloty Kornblatt, the troupe's ringmaster, accidentally blunders into a mockery of the nation's glorious leader. He doesn't even know why the sparse crowd is laughing, but they are and so he continues with the inadvertent satire, ending the show on a rare triumphant note. The confused ringmaster is quickly captured, thrown into prison, and sentenced to death. The troupe must design an intricate prison-break built around their unique (and possibly useless) skills. Hijinks ensue, recounted with deadpan humor and flickering hope by Flora Bialy, Zloty’s understudy and our shy narrator.

The Pickle Index

Sudden Oak Books

Sometime right around now, doctors, nurses and-most of all-parents begin to notice an epidemic spreading among newborn children, children who are physically normal in every way except that they do not speak and do not respond to speech. They don't learn to read, don't learn to write. Theories abound-maybe a popular antidepressant is the cause. Maybe these children, lacking the ability to use or comprehend language, have special skills of their own. Unfolding in a series of brief testimonials from parents, teachers, friends, doctors, cult leaders, profiteers, impostors-everyone touched by the silent phenomenon except, of course, the children themselves-The Silent History is both a bold storytelling experiment and an unexpectedly propulsive reading experience. Originally conceived and serially published as an award-winning iPhone/iPad app by Eli Horowitz, the former publisher of McSweeney's, along with two acclaimed novelists (Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett) and one intrepid coder (Russell Quinn), the book has been re-edited and, at times, rewritten into a definitive, nuanced and unputdownable text, a story that is timely, timeless and terrifying.

HarperCollins, Publishers

The Final Days of Kobold Kody’s Frontier Exposition and Tonic Show

Fantasy

Pink Narcissus Press

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