DISCOVERIES

I Got Somebody in Staunton

Stories

William Henry Lewis

Amistad: 224 pp., $22.95

William Henry Lewis has a knack for taking things apart and putting them back together in a different way. In the title story of this, his second, resplendent collection, a 28-year-old history professor finds himself “in another situation where graduate degrees, pedagogical discourse, and academic distinction” just don’t cut it. He’s out in the Virginia sticks, on his way to visit his dying uncle in Staunton, and the blond hitchhiker he picked up is flirting in the parking lot of a gas station with four mean-looking white boys with “washed-out faces.” Because “her skin looks more like theirs than mine,” he feels like “running is a good thing to do.” You want him to, and he does eventually, but you also want him to hold his ground, and he does that too. In “Shades,” a 14-year-old boy, saturated in violence at home and at school, meets his father for the first time and realizes that his “mother must have believed in his eyes.” In the story “In the Swamp,” a man drowns himself in a swamp that he and the narrator used to visit together, a place haunted by the spirits of slaves and their children who once hid there. The stories are beautifully written and carefully crafted, set in Virginia, Brooklyn and the Bahamas. There’s something vaguely embarrassing about them, because the world Lewis writes about is that old world -- you know, the one we thought would change.

*

Twilight of the Long-Ball Gods

Dispatches From the Disappearing Heart of Baseball

John Schulian

Bison: 184 pp., $12.95 paper

“These are the memories that make me a kid again,” writes John Schulian, a longtime sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times and Sports Illustrated. “These memories of a Los Angeles that I can scarcely believe existed and of two Pacific Coast League teams not so much forgotten as overwhelmed by the city’s ceaseless charge into the future.” Schulian grew up in 1950s L.A., where you “never traveled by freeway unless you were going to Pasadena.” His “minor league heroes were regular guys. They lived among us, they worked among us.” Schulian is drawn to “baseball’s shadow world,” underdogs and losers who fascinated him even as a child -- men like the portly Steve Bilko (“Not Even Mrs. Bilko Knows His Weight” ran a headline in the Los Angeles Times), Josh Gibson (“a legend on life support”) and guys who (quoting Tom Waits) “lived on nothin’ but dreams and train smoke.” He writes about Gilmore Field, with the drive-in theater behind the right field wall, and Wrigley, the “uptown field.” He attends three junior high schools in three years, moving to Salt Lake City and feeling a little better about it all because the Stars move to Salt Lake too, and become the Bees. He writes about a 22-year-old right-hander on his way to the Wally Moon baseball school in Phoenix to follow his dream. Although Schulian admits to periodic disillusionment (“Sometimes it feels like baseball dares you to love it”), he’s clearly given his heart to the game.

*

The Bitch Posse

A Novel

Martha O’Connor

St. Martin’s Press: 352 pp., $22.95

Somewhere between Susanna Moore’s “In the Cut” and Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary” lies the mysterious, violent world of Martha O’Connor’s “Bitch Posse.” Three girls go from 17 to thirtysomething, determined to escape the Midwest but in no way prepared to face the results of their own actions. They are good girls by day and serious risk takers at night. One ends up in a mental hospital, one tries hard to set up a normal home as an adult, and one can’t seem to stop hurling herself into destructive relationships. “The blade chugs across my arm, slicing pretty deep, and the blood flows up to the surface, and ... reality crashes into me ... a ping of sensation. I’m struck like a tuning fork and vibrate with life; I do feel better. I feel alive, and everything around me is crisper, cleaner, louder, more defined. The air rings with importance. I matter. I am.”