Book Detective

It's gonna be.

I believe.

The Giants win the pennant.

The Giants win the pennant.

The Giants win the pennant.

The Giants win the pennant."

-- Russ Hodges, October 3, 1951

On the fiftieth anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World," Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Jackie Gleason is razzing Toots Shor in Leo Durocher's box seats; J. Edgar Hoover, basking in Sinatra's celebrity, is about to be told that the Russians have tested an atomic bomb; and Russ Hodges, raw-throated and excitable, announces the game -- the Giants and the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in New York. DeLillo's transcendent account of one of the iconic events of the twentieth century is a masterpiece of American sportswriting.

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

The Great American Novel by Philip Roth

Home Game by Paul Quarrington

The Youngest Hero by Jerry B. Jenkins

The Sweetheart Season by Karen Joy Fowler

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man by Joseph Heller

Flood by Robert Penn Warren

Pictures of Fidelman by Bernard Malamud

Calico Joe by John Grisham

Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell

The Arrangement by Elia Kazan

Answered Prayers by Truman Capote

Angels on Toast by Dawn Powell

A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava

A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell

Americana by Don DeLillo

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Don't Let Me Go by Catherine Ryan Hyde