Read a portion of "California Rental" from An Inside Passage by Kurt Caswell:

"Late summer blackberries are gone now. The vines have drawn their juices in. And the sunburned grass is oak-leaf strewn, brittle to my every step. Yellow jackets (people here call them “meat bees”) cluster like crabs between the window and the screen. And in this stillness waiting, it rains the first rain in weeks on the hour of the equinox.

I walk outside my rented house in the southern Cascade Mountains of northern California, inspecting the ground for black bear tracks near the woodpile; I thought I heard footsteps in the night. I find no bear sign in the rained-fresh earth but there, where reflected light redirects my eye, a small red toy car. I pick it up. It is dense and boxy, foreign and artificial. Who was the child who dropped this here? How long ago? Mother calling? Or haphazardly in pursuit of something else? What life passed through this place in a time just beyond my reach?

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Read from Chapter 4, "1908: The Year of the Song", in Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song by Amy Whorf McGuiggan:

"That magical 1908 season seemed to have turned every New Yorker into a Giants—and baseball—fan. The old wooden grandstand was routinely filled with celebrities, politicians, and the stars of Broadway and vaudeville. But the thrills of that 1908 season, its ecstasies and agonies, were all still months away on the April day when Jack Norworth, riding the New York subway, saw a gaudy, lithographed poster of a silk-hosed baseball player standing with a bat on his shoulder.

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Read an excerpt from the title chapter of Kokomo Joe: The Story of the First Japanese American Jockey in the United States by John Christgau:

"The radio news was that Santa Anita Race Track had opened. Tucked up against the wall of the San Gabriel Mountains, the track seemed an inviting playground, utterly free of irritating stiff rules of conduct. Those magazines he read pictured rich gamblers wearing bowties standing alongside bathing beauties and movie actors, all of them flashing exactly the same broad smiles that had become his trademark. It was obvious that a good smile was the passkey to American success.

Carrying his small suitcase again, Joe hitchhiked across Los Angeles to Santa Anita racetrack. He made his way through a sea of pansies planted around the track to a gate at the backstretch, where a guard in a baggy suit and a police hat stopped him.

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Read from Chapter 1 of Breathing in the Fullness of Time by William Kloefkorn:

"Desire. Without it, you might as well pack up and go home. Fran Welch, Coach Welch, had said this when the season began, then repeated it at frequent but irregular intervals as the season moved along. By now, I had decided I no longer wanted to play college football. So I turned in my gear and went home, but not before Coach Welch gave me an asschewing I'll not live long enough to forget. Before the chewing began, though, he wanted to know why in the name of Christ I was quitting.

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Read from Chapter 1, "Hurricane" from How to Cook a Tapir: A Memoir of Belize by Joan Fry:

"When I had announced my wedding plans to my parents, they were appalled. They disapproved of Aaron's politics. They disapproved of the fact that he, an older man—he was a graduate student—was taking me, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, on a "working honeymoon" for a year in the jungle. Like most people, they had no idea where British Honduras was. Africa? An island off the coast of China? Only my German-born grandfather, who had run away to sea at fourteen, knew it was a tiny Central American country the size of Massachusetts, south of Mexico and east and north of Guatemala. Its entire eastern border faced the Caribbean as though the country were sprawled on its side, facing the azure half-moon of the earth's second-largest barrier reef. Along its spine grew some of Central America's most pristine rainforest. That's where Aaron and I were going—where the Maya lived.

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Read "Twenty-Four-Hour Happy Hour" from The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas by Alan Jay Zaremba:

"It is the morning of the first day of the tournament. I wake early, shower, dress, and prepare for the madness that I know awaits me. Before I leave my hotel room I gather what I’ll need as I travel through the day. I collect casino betting line sheets, a section of the New York Daily News that includes a description of each of the sixty-four teams in the tournament, some pens, and two small yellow notepads. It’s 6:30 when I exit the room and walk toward the bank of elevators.

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In honor of Women's History Month and our Women's History Month sale, today's excerpt comes from a book published in 2008, Mayor Helen Boosalis: My Mother's Life in Politics by Beth Boosalis Davis:

"An unfamiliar voice at the other end of the phone asked, "Is this Mary Beth?" Immediately the question engaged my Nebraska self—Nebraska, where I was known for eighteen years as Mary Beth before going off to college, where I was M.B., and eventually dropping Mary altogether by the time I married. Mary Beth had always sounded southern to me anyway, though I liked being named after my grandmothers, Mary and Bertha (Beth and Bertha are the same in Greek: Panayiota).

This disembodied phone voice was calling me by my familial, familiar, Nebraska name—and not my grown-up name, Beth. Who was it? "You don't know me. My name is Neil Oxman and I'm working with your mother's campaign."

"Oh hi," I managed to interrupt the increasingly emphatic, eastern-accented caller.

"Look, you don't know me. I don't know you. But everyone I've talked to here in Nebraska agrees that you need to come home. Your mom needs your help and people say you'll know what to do. Besides, you're the only child, so it's up to you."

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