It's about where to hit the ball, when, and why. It focuses on playing tennis strategically, which is the quickest and best way to raise your game to the next level. For recreational players, developing a strategic approach to the game is the single, most transformative step you can take. In this book, you will learn how to take advantage of the strengths in your game, how to minimize your weaknesses, and how to attack your opponent's game. Most tennis players start by focusing on the mechanics of their strokes. That makes sense. If you can't hit the ball over the net and inside the lines, the rest doesn't really matter. Later, when you're hitting the ball well, it's fun to keep working on your shots. All tennis players love to hit the ball. Unfortunately, stroke improvement has a diminishing return. Early on you improve rapidly, but then the pace levels off. It can be frustrating to work, week after week, month after month, and not see any progress. Developing your strategic understanding of the game completely changes that dynamic. It's difficult to exaggerate how much focusing on strategy can improve every aspect of your game. At first glance, tennis is a marvelously simple game. All you have to do is hit the ball over the net and inside the lines one time more than your opponent does and you win the point. Do that often enough and you win the match. In truth, however, tennis is endlessly complex. That's why it becomes a lifetime passion for so many of us. It's a demanding amalgamation of muscle memory, hand-eye coordination, geometric understanding, stamina, and split-second decision making. Adding another layer of complexity, most of us model our games on professional tennis players. We see them win points by smacking the felt off the ball, going for the lines, serving aces, and hitting topspin lobs from outside the doubles alley. We want to play like that. The catch is we don't have unbelievable hand-eye coordination and don't practice eight hours a day. Is it any wonder, then, that about 80 percent of points in a recreational match end with an unforced error? That's right. Eight out of 10 points-and often more-end because you or your opponent hit the ball into the net or outside the lines. When we come out of top in a match, we like to think that we won. It's probably more accurate to say that we didn't lose. At the core of strategic success at the recreational level is reducing unforced errors. Cutting them by just one or two per set can lead to an exponential leap in matches won. This book are filled with strategies and tactics that you can adopt and adapt to improve your game. You don't need to apply all of them; use only the concepts that work for you. If altering the strategies better suits your game, go for it. Playing strategically will make your game more consistent. You'll become a better competitor, and you'll have more fun.

    Illustrator and writer's Carolyn Marie Castagna's first shared short story.A small icicle hanging from a roof peers inside a window at a small reading room, and learns about magical human qualities, and the importance of the one most special human feeling.

    . . an alphabet soup of -delight in language. Eat up."—Alice Sebold"Brilliant. Wildly inventive, profane, and hilarious."—Bret Easton EllisThe author of the acclaimed cult classic Dear Dead Person ("refreshing, nauseating, hilarious"—Kirkus) returns with this long-awaited collection of brilliantly written and outrageously imaginative short stories.Benjamin Weissman is the author of Dear Dead Person (High Risk/Serpent’s Tail, 1995). He is a contributing editor to Bomb Magazine and writes regularly for the contemporary art magazines Parkett and Artforum. A painter and a professor at Art Center College of Design and Otis College of the Arts, he now lives in Los Angeles.

    What we have here in this big fat volume is a cockeyed chrestomathy of 37 Algren pieces... with his hallmark stamped on every link." —The New York Times Book Review"The range of the book is satisfying—rich, will titillate even the most fastidious dilettante or culture vulture... also contains pieces that will make you laugh your head off. Once you begin reading it, you will not be able to put it aside." —The Chicago Tribune"Essential Algren." —The Washington Post"Very good, fast, funny and tough... Algren, where have you been hiding?" —The San Francisco ChronicleHere again is Algren's rich output from the 1960s and '70s, tough, streetwise stories and travelogues from around the world: accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of his beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects.

    These 11 gemlike tales range from the blue heart of the blizzard of 1888 to the sweltering jungles of war.Wickedness --Playland --The killers --His dog --The sun so hot I froze to death --Can I just sit here for a while? --The boogeyman --True romance --Sleepless --Red-letter days --Nebraska

    These people tell us the truth–not only about themselves, their relationships, and their lives, but about ourselves as well. A Perfect Stranger powerfully and affectingly examines the complex, intricate network of experiences that binds us to one another. These stories are tender, raw, lovely, fine–and they reaffirm Roxana Robinson’s place at the forefront of modern literature.

    Yet here he is in SoCal, launching a private investigations firm with two ex-SEAL buddies, settling into a long-term relationship with L.A. county’s hottest assistant district attorney, Avalon Rossi. Figures he’d be the one to flush ZSI’s make-or-break job down the toilet. Now his rich, powerful client’s allegedly unfaithful wife is dead. And the evidence isn’t the only thing with gaping holes in it. Avalon has never seen Zach blow his cool, until the lid blows off this latest can of worms. Her gift for thinking on her feet keeps him out of trouble—for now—though lately she’s wondering if his knee-melting kisses haven’t melted all her good sense. When it turns out one of ZSI’s own is a suspect, it’ll take more than fast talking to keep him from taking the fall. And another victim from landing in the morgue.

    Maxine Theobald hid herself from the rest of society to protect her father's name. But as she grows tired of her role playing games every year during the famous Theobald weekend parties, she starts to question how she has been living her life. She starts to wonder about the other part of her that she was deprived of--her mother and why she left her. A DISGUISE... Having finally found the courage to search for the one thing that she believes can help her understand her true nature, Maxine cuts her hair, puts on her breeches and runs away from the only home she has ever known. She travels to the affluent town of Wickhurst and found herself employed as the valet of the famous rake Nicholas Everard, a game she will later find to be quite dangerous. SOMETHING DIFFERENT... Maxine set out into an adventure with none but one goal, yet found herself stumbling upon an unlikely find for the search of something else--romance. Still set in the fictional place of the Town, this fifth book in the Everard Family series follows one heroine who has chosen to defy the norm and her own fears in an attempt to understand her own nature, the first step to a discovery of not just about her lineage, but of a love so unexpectedly, irritatingly and undeniably powerful.

    Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields-and fields of victory-that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly- and reluctantly-in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy's singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.

    With his unflinching attention to emotional detail, Redhill proves once again to be "a writer of considerable humanity and insight" (A.L. Kennedy) .

    In Where the Money Went, he surprises us with stories about love and the desertion of love, all written from a man’s point of view. Rarely is a man so revealing.A narrator struggles with his abiding loyalty to his ex-wife, even when he finds love with another woman. A newly divorced man learns more than he wants to know about his friends’ long-term marriages. In these nine stories, which incisively touch on the complex nature of love, we find men as fathers, as husbands, and as lovers, trying their best in a world that stubbornly refuses to make sense. Canty, whose writing has been praised as “smart, gritty, unsentimental” (New York Times), “lovely and unforgiving” (Boston Globe), and “enchanting and painful” (USA Today), powerfully conveys both the bitterness that can afflict romantic relationships, and the moments of humor and tenderness that cut through it.

    It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.Ann Beattie published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1972. Twenty-eight years later, she received the 2000 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is, as the Washington Post Book World said, "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form." The eleven stories in her new work are peopled by characters coming to terms with the legacies of long-held family myths or confronting altered circumstances -- new frailty or sudden, unlikely success. Beattie's ear for language, her complex and subtle wit, and her profound compassion are unparalleled. From the elegiac story "The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea," in which two men trade ruminations on illness, art, and servitude, to "The Big-Breasted Pilgrim," wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos, Perfect Recall comprises Beattie's strongest work in years. It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.

    It is the finest collection yet from a contemporary master of the form.Beginning with the sudden terror of a family caught up in shocking sectarian violence, and ending with the whiteout of an Iowa blizzard and the fear of losing your way very far from home, this collection is about bonds made and broken, secret and known. In the extraordinary story "Up the Coast," a landscape painter discovers a place that makes her, finally, feel whole, only to have that communion shattered by an arbitrary act of aggression that will resonate throughout her life.Written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are hauntingly real. MacLaverty's perfect attention to every detail, every nuance of idiom and character, remakes the world for us here on the page.