Novel

Perhaps no other sport has been written about as much as baseball. You can struggle to come up with a good basketball novel (would Updike's "Rabbit, Run" qualify?), but there's any number of excellent baseball novels, ranging from Ring Lardner's "You Know Me Al" to Bernard Malamud's "The Natural" to Mark Harris' "Bang the Drum Slowly."Baseball has also attracted an increasing number of nonfiction writers. Some, such as Roger Kahn and Roger Angell, have helped us understand and appreciate a complex, subtle sport.

Ten Days in the Hills Jane Smiley Alfred A. Knopf / 452 pages / $26 Here's a story for you: "A group of ten young people over the course of ten days" comes together "in a luxurious retreat from the horrors" of their chaotic society. They discuss "everyday concerns, and uneasiness about, on the one hand, money, and on the other hand, God." This narrative offers "celebrity-named characters in several stories. ... It observes contemporary manners and ideas," and the tales the characters tell "of mutability, of jokes and tricks and miracles, prepare them for their fates as well as distract them."

The Gathering By Anne Enright Black Cat-Grove Press / 272 pages / $14 Anne Enright is part of a remarkable generation of Irish writers who have helped transform their country's literature as surely as globalization has transformed their nation's economy. In some ways, the process has been remarkably similar - an enthusiasm for and immersion in foreign influence carried home to make Ireland's insularity no more than a geographic fact, at last. Like her contemporaries John Banville and Colm Toibin, Enright has been frank about the influence of American writers - particularly Don DeLillo, in her case - on her work.

Finn Jon Clinch Random House / 292 pages / $23.95 Jon Clinch has staked himself to a stiff challenge in his debut novel: casting Mark Twain's monstrous creation Pap Finn - feckless father of Huck - as a leading man. The resulting book is dark and often gripping, though marred by stylistic excess and a shortage of pathos. I suspect the central academic achievement of Finn will be to transport the world's Twain scholars into a collective tizzy. Clinch has, as they say, taken liberties with the back story.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a magnum opus about a haunted gunslinger on a quest for a mysterious spire, stretched out over 22 years, seven novels and 4,272 pages of eerie adventure. But here's the really spooky thing: King fans want more. Now they're about to get it, although King is taking his readers to a new place that might scare some off. The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, the Marvel Comics series, launches this week, and more than 100 retailers are opening for midnight release parties.

"Baroque-pop" artist Badly Drawn Boy, whose most recent album, Born in the UK, was released in October, performs Tuesday night at 7:30 at the 9:30 Club. BDB, also known as Damon Gough, also scored the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel About a Boy. Adem is also billed. The 9:30 Club is at 815 V St. N.W., Washington. Tickets are $25. Call 800-955-5566 or go to tickets.com.

The Rest of Her Life By Laura Moriarty Hyperion / 306 pages / $24.95 Your 18-year-old daughter is driving the family SUV, and she kills someone. What do you do? In Laura Moriarity's second novel, The Rest of Her Life, Leigh Churchill confronts that dilemma head on. After her daughter, Kara, accidentally hits a pedestrian in the crosswalk, Leigh tries to help her daughter cope with the legal and emotional ramifications of the accident. But despite her best efforts, she can't get through to Kara, even though she has a good rapport with just about everyone else in the story: her husband, Gary, a college professor, her prepubescent son, Justin, her sister, Pam, her friend, Eva, and the middle-school students she teaches.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union By Michael Chabon HarperCollins / 411 pages / $26.95 Let's begin with an uncomfortable question: What has Michael Chabon been up to for the past seven years? Certainly he's been writing; in 2002, he published Summerland, a lengthy baseball fantasy for young readers, and two years later, his novella The Final Solution imagined Sherlock Holmes as an old man. He has also edited a couple of anthologies and created a series of comic books featuring the Escapist, the superhero he invented for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001.

Nothing novel about sensitivity The front-page story on sexual harassment training for Maryland legislators was terribly depressing ("Trying to instill basic sensitivity," Jan. 25). Don't harass women when you have power over them? Don't make female colleagues feel uneasy with sexual remarks you would not dare make around your wife or daughter? Those ideas seemed to hit these men like a hot news flash. Have they been asleep for the past 20 years? Was this truly the first time they had ever heard that they should treat women with respect?

The Almost Moon By Alice Sebold Little, Brown / 292 pages / $24.99 Alice Sebold's well-received memoir, Lucky, and her best-selling debut novel, The Lovely Bones, successfully mined the ugly side of contemporary life. Lucky is a riveting account of Sebold's rape as a college freshman. Its title was prompted by a detective's remark that she was lucky to be alive, since another rape victim at the university had been killed and dismembered. The Lovely Bones is a stunning novel told from the unique perspective of a deceased 14-year-old victim of rape, murder and dismemberment.

James McBride had no idea Maryland's Eastern Shore would be the setting for his next novel when he first headed there about seven years ago. In fact, he says, he was on his way to Washington to research a book on the death of Abraham Lincoln when he impulsively decided to turn left on U.S. 50 instead of right. "I wanted to visit the house where Lincoln died," says McBride, a Brooklyn native with homes in New York and Bucks County, Pa. "I started driving down that way, but then I just veered off at Annapolis and started heading in the other direction."

E. LYNN HARRIS, 54 Pioneer of gay black fiction E. Lynn Harris, a best-selling author of popular black fiction who shattered barriers by writing about gay characters in novels such as Invisible Life and Just As I Am: A Novel, died Thursday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Mr. Harris, who divided his time between Atlanta and Fayetteville, Ark., became ill at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills during a visit to Los Angeles, his publicist, Laura Gilmore, said Friday. The coroner's office is conducting an autopsy, she said.

Until recently, the sagging economy wasn't a subject Dr. Mary Newman routinely discussed during office visits. But after a steady stream of longtime patients confided that they had been laid off, were about to lose their health insurance or that their pay had been slashed, she added the recession to her standard checklist of questions. "It's hitting people I hadn't expected," said Newman, an internist who practices in Lutherville. "If a person is in financial hardship, we help them." Doctors are encountering more patients struggling to pay for care.

The 8-ton steel set that fills the stage for the Kennedy Center's new production of Ragtime, with its four levels of scaffolding adorned with lacy, Gothic arches, becomes a visual metaphor for the relentless forward thrust of history. Each level is crowded with actors portraying the different social groups and celebrity figures in the U.S. in 1906 - a Jewish immigrant and his daughter; an upper-middle-class Victorian family; an African-American jazz pianist, his sweetheart and their child.

ELISHA RAY NANCE, 94 Last surviving D-Day 'Bedford Boy' When World War II broke out, the "Bedford Boys" left home to serve. Many of them didn't come home - so many that the community had among the greatest losses per capita on D-Day. Now the last survivor has died. Elisha Ray Nance died Sunday in Bedford, Va., a spokesman for Tharp Funeral Home and Crematory said Monday. Mr. Nance was among 38 National Guardsmen from the close-knit community of Bedford who were in Company A of the 116th Infantry, a spokeswoman at the National D-Day Memorial Foundation said.

It wasn't apparent to anyone for the longest time that Baltimore author Philipp Meyer had hopped the freight train to success - just like the protagonist of his acclaimed debut novel, American Rust. Every time Meyer's line of boxcars seemed to be chugging along the straight and narrow, it would suddenly grind to a halt and shift into reverse. For starters, despite a stratospheric IQ, Meyer dropped out of City College at age 16. After three tries, he elbowed his way into prestigious Cornell University.

American Rust By Philipp Meyer Spiegel & Grau / 367 pages / $24.95 Isaac English isn't given to idle speculation. Like his friend, Billy Poe, he has to learn his lessons the hard way. American Rust, Philipp Meyer's debut novel, gets its power from their efforts to do just that. The characters manage (and fail to manage) their complex lives in run-down neighborhoods, where they get drunk, argue, fight, have sex, find and lose hope, kill (by accident), attempt suicide and run away. They also struggle mightily with the meaning of love, not the romance-novel type but the what-would-Jesus-do type.

monday Apologize, Apologize! : A Novel : by Elizabeth Kelly (Grand Central/Twelve, $23.99) Collie is the dull link in his flamboyant family, which includes his adulterous, alcoholic father, a cruelly pugnacious mother, a pigeon-racing uncle and a prep-school failure brother. Collie lives in quiet, stable success until a one-two punch of family tragedy leaves him reeling. tuesday Handle With Care : by Jodi Picoult (Atria/Washington Square Press, $27.95) A couple confront the question of what constitutes a valuable life as they care for their disabled daughter.

Drood By Dan Simmons Little, Brown and Co. / 784 pages / $26.99 Everything seems skimpy these days. Things look pinched, narrow, watered down, washed out, choked off. So much seems to be shrinking: hope, energy, dollars, jobs. Even the horizon looks as if it were left in the dryer too long. We're trimming our sails, hedging our bets. Scrimping. Saving. Hunkering down. Then along comes Dan Simmons and his new novel, Drood, a big, hairy, smelly, loud, messy behemoth of a book, and suddenly, all that smallness, all that caution, looks silly.

FILM 'Waltz With Bashir': With vibrant, almost-trippy visuals, Ari Folman turns what could have been a stodgy documentary on its head. In the animated film, Folman interviews his old Israeli army comrades, trying to recall memories so disturbing that he has blocked them out. An Oscar nominee for best foreign film, Waltz is both haunting and beautiful. In theaters Friday. POP MUSIC 'Years of Refusal' : by Morrissey: Keeping up the momentum of a comeback that began in earnest with 2004's You Are the Quarry, the enigmatic British singer returns with a solid set of songs that plays to his strengths: a polished but punkish croon and grudge-laced lyrics.