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Baseball is back! And in honor of this week’s opening of the 2012 major league baseball season, we’re taking a look at Overlook’s baseball bookshelf.Arguably one of the greatest books ever written about the sport is Robert Coover’s classic 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Reissued last year by Overlook, this timeless novel received a glowing tribute in

Jeremy Wilson of the literary journal Triquarterly reviews The Man with Two Arms: "In Billy Lombardo’s new novel, The Man with Two Arms, Henry Granville, a science teacher and baseball nut, looks at the birth of his child as an opportunity for an experiment. Would it be possible to groom a perfectly symmetrical human through a strict campaign that insisted the child perform all his motor functions with both hands? Additionally, Henry wonders what intellectual benefits his self-described “symmetry campaign” might have. Could his child end up perfectly balanced between left-brain and right-brain skills? So, from an early age, Henry’s son Danny must obsessively alternate using his right hand and his left while throwing and hitting a baseball, brushing his teeth, writing and drawing, and everything else you can imagine. The symmetry campaign works—almost too well—as Danny not only becomes the greatest baseball player the world has ever seen, but also gets burdened with a mild case of clairvoyance. But with baseball superstardom comes the inevitable gaze of the public eye, and the constant attention and expectations threaten to destroy Danny, his family, and the game that he loves.

To say that The Man with Two Arms is just another sports book would be like saying Danny Granville is just another baseball player. As Henry tells Danny late in the novel, “You’re about something much bigger than baseball,” so is Lombardo’s novel. The title alone speaks to freakishness, a sideshow act that charges admission, and by doing so inherently asks several intriguing questions. How does the world define and react to unique talent? Are these talents gifts or burdens? What responsibility do people with these “freakish” talents have to the public? Danny echoes other talented superstars who often just want to be left alone to do what they do best. But when you are that good at baseball, or at anything, you become something more than an individual with individual wants and desires.

Playing for the Chicago Cubs, Danny evolves into a type of messiah, the chosen one who could redeem a franchise for a century of suffering. “It seemed as though the world had been made for [Danny]—that when God, or whomever, had first come upon the excellent idea of a world, he had done so with the image of Danny Granville in his head. [ . . . ] It was possible, even, that God had waited this long billions of years in anticipation for that to happen.” But can anyone, even the greatest baseball player ever, be expected to hold up under such an enormous burden of responsibility? Or perhaps a better question might be, does he even have a responsibility?

Questions of science and art, family and responsibility, fate and chance, the individual and society, permeate the depths of what is on the surface a simple story rendered in a youthful and fable-like style. Lombardo cut his teeth onstage at Chicago’s Uptown Poetry Slam, and, in addition to two other collections of short stories, has recently published a collection of poems, Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns. His background as a poet shows in his musical descriptions of simple movements. “Henry poured Killian’s Red into his pint glass from the still parade of knobbed options on tap, filled it to the lip of the mug and walked as though the floor were a tightrope beneath him.” Lombardo paints the pouring of a beer as a triumphant ac

Alan Cheuse reviews The Man with Two Arms by Billy Lombardo, a novel about a baseball pitcher who can throw both right- and left-handed on All Things Considered from NPR News.

"The 2010 baseball season has begun and our book reviewer, Alan Cheuse, has found what he considers the first fine baseball novel of the season. It's called The Man With Two Arms, and it's written by Chicago writer and teacher Billy Lombardo.

ALAN CHEUSE: The man of the title is Danny Granville. He comes from Chicagoland and he has two golden arms. His baseball-crazed father, Henry, raises him from infancy to play ball, and specifically to pitch both left-handed and right-handed. With coaches' thoughts in his head and Astroturf in his basement, father Henry cultivates a champion, a switch-pitcher who grows up to be a beautifully trained athlete with a great talent for baseball.

Through high school and college we watch Danny grow, and when he hits the majors playing for the Cubs, his first season looks as though it's going to be a triumph. Danny is something like a natural and his game-obsessed father does everything he can to enhance his son's natural abilities.

From the boy's first year on, the father directs him steadily and scientifically toward balance. As Danny's art student girlfriend Brigit discovers when she gets him to undress in preparation for posing for her that early propensity for balance has produced in the ballplayer an anatomical symmetry close to perfection.

It seems perfectly appropriate that Danny begins his major league career by pitching several games as close to perfect as it gets when the pitcher bows out in a late inning.

Lombardo's one-of-a-kind novel about a one-of-a-kind ballplayer is just as engrossing as a perfect game going into the late innings. If you're in the stands, you don't want to look away from the field, let alone leave the stadium early. Those who love to read about this great pastime will have this same feeling when reading about Danny Granville, on and off the field."

Journalist, sportswriter, and biographer Allen Barra offers some glowing praise for Billy Lombardo's new baseball novel The Man With Two Arms: "Most great baseball fiction—books such as Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and Kevin Baker’s Sometimes You See It Coming come quickly to mind—are heavy on the realism but with a touch of the weird. Billy Lombardo’s fits neatly on a shelf with those classics. Lombardo, author of such fine collections of short stories as Logic of A Rose and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns, is a Chicago-based writer and editor who is both a master of fiction and a consummate observer of the game, which is what makes his strange premise so oddly believable: Henry Granville, a baseball fanatic, trains his son Danny to pitch with both hands, much in the way Mickey Mantle’s father trained him as a switch hitter. Lombardo is as deft at handling the comic and tragic aspects of his story as his creation, Danny, is at whizzing them in from both sides of the plate. Let’s subtitle The Man with Two Arms “The Unnatural” and call it the best baseball-themed fiction so far this decade.

Billy Lombardo, author of The Man With Two Arms, is profiled by Tom Lynch in Chicago's New City weekly newspaper: "Billy Lombardo strolls into The Breakfast Club on Hubbard Street fifteen minutes late, having missed his stop as he took the train into the city from his home in Forest Park. He was writing, he says, finally making progress on something new, and he wasn’t paying attention. The author, though in his forties, exudes a childlike whimsy when he laughs at his mistake—he’s apologetic, but he wears an excited, goofball sort of grin that’s apology enough. He has a lot to smile about.

Lombardo’s first novel, The Man With Two Arms, was just released by Overlook Press, a baseball book about a father who teaches his son to throw with both his left and right arms; the son becomes Major League Baseball’s first superstar ambidextrous pitcher.