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Welcome to the first installation of the Penguin Blog's month-long Spring Sports Extravaganza! Each Thursday in the month of April we will be showcasing a different sport including baseball, golf, tennis, and soccer.

This week, baseball season is here. Penguin is celebrating the start of this great American (and now worldwide) institution with a slew of new releases!

Whether you play for the majors or little league, have a fantasy team, or are just interested in the latest baseball scandal, let's see if Penguin can help you hit a home run this Spring!

Penguin's 2009 Baseball Titles:

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One of the most enjoyable events I attended when the hardcover of Blood Kin came out last year was the Public Library Association Conference in Minneapolis. Caught up in all the public library love, I found myself admitting to a room full of librarians that my first fetish object was a library stamp. One of my favorite pastimes when I was little was cataloguing and labeling and then arranging in alphabetical order every single book in our house, and then checking them out to myself and my imaginary borrowers with my sister's Hello Kitty stamp. My mother, needless to say, was not impressed when she discovered that her first edition J.M. Coetzee novels had been Hello Kitty-ied.

We moved around so much when I was little that we could never take many books along with us (despite books being my family's main passion, as my mother was a literary critic), and our pilgrimages to the new public library in whichever town we turned up in were some of the most anticipated journeys of my childhood. If my mother ever lost track of where I was in the library, she knew she would find me gazing longingly at the due date stamp at the check-out counter, mesmerized as the librarian changed the date with a twirl of the metal numeric rings, and the confident way she stacked up open books on top of one another to stamp their back covers in quick succession.

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When I was a girl, growing up as an American expatriate in such places as Venezuela and London, England, I had the rare opportunity to see the world and to view my own country as our global neighbors do. 

But no matter how far we traveled, every summer I would beg to be sent to my grandmother's house in Indianola, Mississippi.  It's a small town where my brothers used to joke that if you were driving through and blinked, you'd miss it.  They claimed that the 'Welcome to Indianola' sign had the words ‘turn your clock back twenty years' written at the bottom.