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.

Zach Teal is just 17, but his love for books led him to write one of his own and to volunteer more than 250 hours at the Finksburg branch of the Carroll County Public Library. "Two hundred and fifty hours is quite unusual for our teen volunteers," said Heather Owings, who was volunteer coordinator at the library and now works at the North Carroll branch. Zach logged those hours over the course of three years, performing such tasks as making crafts for story times, signing in reading program participants, even wearing a mouse costume for a reading of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

M.T. Smith, of Randallstown, recently released a book, "A Familiar Murder," on Amazon.com. The murder mystery takes the reader through Baltimore neighborhoods while solving a crime being perpetrated on the elderly. Smith is a former creative director for Guild Communications Inc, a community relations firm in Greenbelt. McDonogh School Director of Aquatics Scott Ward, of Owings Mills, has been named the recipient of the Thomas R. Harper Endowed Teaching Chair. This award was established in 2001 by alumnus Bob Chilstrom to honor his 1963 classmate, Tom Harper, who retired in 2004 after teaching English at McDonogh School for 36 years.The Harper Chair recognizes outstanding service to the school by a faculty or staff member.

Harry Potter novels will be available through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, Amazon said today, in announcing a deal with J.K. Rowling's Pottermor e website. announced today. Of course, there's a catch. To get access to the library, you'll need to spend $79 for an Amazon program that also offers perks such as free two-day shipping. “We're absolutely delighted to have reached this agreement with Pottermore. This is the kind of significant investment in the Kindle ecosystem that we'll continue to make on behalf of Kindle owners,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

Twelve -year-old Connor Sullivan has anger-management problems. How he grapples with his temper drives the plot of "Hothead," an entertaining first young-adult novel by legendary Orioles infielder and Hall-of-Famer Cal Ripken Jr. and Baltimore Sun columnist Kevin Cowherd . With its conflict-driven plot, the story is a page-turner. Add concrete details and strong verbs (Cowherd's signature touch), and the story will engage even kids who might have more interest in baseball than in reading.

J.K. Rowling, who created the fabulously successful Harry Potter series of book -- and movies -- will publish her first adult novel, Little, Brown and Co. announced today. The title, date for  worldwide publication and further details about the novel will be announced later in the year, the publisher said. Rowling's website simply shows an enticing, mysterious, yellow book entitled "The New Book. " Clever, that. Rowling said in statement via the publisher, “Although I've enjoyed writing it every bit as much, my next book will be very different to the Harry Potter series ... . The freedom to explore new territory is a gift that Harry's success has brought me, and with that new territory it seemed a logical progression to have a new publisher.

ATLANTA - Several news organizations have jumped into the fight over whether the protectors of "Gone With the Wind" can block the publication of the new novel "The Wind Done Gone." CNN, Cox Enterprises and the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and The Sun, said in "friend of the court" briefs that they "are extremely concerned about the implications of a federal court issuing a preliminary injunction blocking publication of a potentially significant work of fiction that comments on the evils of slavery."

Susan Straight is in love with words, the way they sound, the images they suggest, the energies they possess. Here she describes the protagonist of her second novel, "Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights":"Darnell worked in a cloud of moving grit, and only the sliding drops of sweat carried the dust from his forehead, his neck. He stayed away from Jackson Park, working all alone in the gas station, feeling the black heat rise on the asphalt all around him until he imagined that he looked like one of the zombies from the alley, his eyes sunk gray into his skull, his palms permanently gray.

As the great 19th century novelists knew, novels without settings are crippled, amputated things. In the best novels of March, setting afflicts characters even as it provides them with the means of transcendence.A sublime novel will appear in March and that is "Fugitive Pieces" by Canadian poet Anne Michaels (Knopf, 294 pages, $23). This first novel at once seizes an important place among the literature of the Holocaust. Its hero Jakob Beer is the sole survivor in his family; his travail is heartbreaking, illuminating, and exquisitely rendered.

A Miracle of Catfish Larry Brown Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill / 455 pages / $24.95 For 16 years, Larry Brown's highly praised novels, short stories and nonfiction illuminated the brutally hard, funny and sometimes magical realities of his native Mississippi. In his sixth novel, A Miracle of Catfish, the book nearing completion when Brown died in 2004, he gives us old men and fathers as fiercely competent as they are murderous, and a factory maintenance man who can't do one blessed thing right, especially when it comes to fathering his wonderful little boy. There are considerably fewer Mississippi wives and daughters in the novel than there are male points of view about the women's attributes and responsibilities (a light touch when cooking biscuits matters, in other words)

When Sasscer Hill was growing up, she rode stick horses and plow horses and read "The Black Stallion" novels, a series of books about the friendship between a young boy and a beautiful black Arabian stallion. In the process, she fell in love — with horses and books and, eventually, writing. On April 15, her novel "Racing from Death" is being released by Wildside Press. It is the second in a series about jockey/ assistant trainer Nikki Latrelle, a Laurel Park-based rider, who finds herself caught up in murder.

USA Network, the American Film Institute and Universal Pictures said today that President Barack Obama will introduce Saturday's airing of “To Kill A Mockingbird,“ the acclaimed adaptation of Harper Lee's acclaimed novel. The tale of lawyer Atticus Finch's battle against racial injustice still resonates with many today -- particularly in light of the Trayvon Martin demonstrations -- and Lee's simple prose makes the novel appropriate for a wide range of readers.

Coming unstuck in time, Pamela Regis was investigating the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime. When the clocks struck 13, she dreamt she went to ... to Manderley? — no, McDaniel. Strange as it might seem, Regis' dream of jumbled-up literary genres will come true this August. In a manner of speaking. Aided by grants totaling $200,000 from the Nora Roberts Foundation, McDaniel College in Westminster is about to launch what is possibly the nation's first academic minor in genre fiction: horror, sci-fi, romance, fantasy, mystery and Westerns, as well as graphic novels.

Maryland succeeded in raising $84 million to invest in promising technology companies across the state via a novel online auction of tax credits, officials announced Thursday. The InvestMaryland plan, a cornerstone of Gov. Martin O'Malley's legislative platform last year, completed a key milestone with the online auction, in which 24 insurance companies bid up the price of tax credits they wanted to receive in the future. In the end, 11 companies won the credits and the state surpassed the minimum of $70 million that it expected to receive.

When she was growing up, Ellen Potter was an avid reader, and nothing thrilled her more than settling down with her well-worn copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic 1911 children's novel, "The Secret Garden. " The book's heroine, 10-year-old Mary Lennox, loses her parents to a cholera outbreak and must start her life anew at a remote manor in rural England. There she meets an array of often-spooky characters, happens on an abandoned garden and brings it back to life. "At the start of that story, Mary's so sour and unlikable.

Behind locked doors in a nondescript Jessup industrial park, workers using secret techniques conjure a material that has promises to supercharge many 21st-century technologies. Called graphene, it's a fine, fluffy black powder that could soon become part of everything from mobile phones to aircraft, circuits to electric car batteries. Graphene is another form of graphite — the stuff in an ordinary pencil. It is just a sheet of carbon that's a single atom thick, but the so-called nanomaterial is one of the strongest and most conductive materials in the world, as much as 200 times stronger than steel.

Although Anne Rice is the most famous of contemporary vampire novelists, she is by no means the only one.Several hundred vampire novels have been published in the past 25 years, with writers such as Chelsea Yarbro, Fred Saberhagen, P. N. Elrod, Tanith Lee, Lori Herter and Elaine Bergstrom turning out multiple tales. Horrormeisters Stephen King, Peter Straub and Clive Barker have all tried their hand at fictional vampires.Here's a look at some of the latest offerings in the genre:* "The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula," by Roderick Anscombe (Hyperion, $22.95)

In September we put aside all those unread beach books and look for something more substantial. It's the time of year when, beyond all reason, we are tempted to buy thick novels with tiny print and pretentious titles. As the faint hint of a chill enters the air, we seem to feel a sudden urge to suffer under the weight of really "serious" prose.How else can one explain this month's publication of Lawrence Norfolk's impenetrable 608-page novel "The Pope's Rhinoceros" (Harmony Books. $25)? A British author who received high praise for his first novel - "Lempriere's Dictionary" - Norfolk is, undoubtedly, a talented young writer with a sharp eye, but his new book buries a good story under a massive pile of detail.

J.K. Rowling, who created the fabulously successful Harry Potter series of book -- and movies -- will publish her first adult novel, Little, Brown and Co. announced today. The title, date for  worldwide publication and further details about the novel will be announced later in the year, the publisher said. Rowling's website simply shows an enticing, mysterious, yellow book entitled "The New Book. " Clever, that. Rowling said in statement via the publisher, “Although I've enjoyed writing it every bit as much, my next book will be very different to the Harry Potter series ... . The freedom to explore new territory is a gift that Harry's success has brought me, and with that new territory it seemed a logical progression to have a new publisher.

February 18 is a day to celebrate, because it was on February 18, 1885, that Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , the definitive American novel. Ernest Hemingway famously said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' " Calling it "one of the great masterpieces of the world," H. L. Mencken said, "I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations, not excepting Emerson.