Mark Winegardner Books in Order

With a friend, a Chevrolet Impala, and a limited budget, Winegardner travels across America. Roadside attractions and encounters with ordinary people become a way to examine national identity, nostalgia, and the cultural presence of Elvis Presley.

Winegardner accompanies veteran baseball scout Tony Lucadello as he searches for promising players on school and college fields. The account explores how a scout recognizes talent, develops relationships, and works behind the more visible world of professional baseball.

In 1946, wealthy Mexican brothers launch a baseball league that attracts discontented American players and Black athletes excluded from the major leagues. Writer Frank Hollinger and pitcher Fireball Smith experience a season shaped by ambition, money, and racial barriers.

This anthology gathers American writers' recollections of food and eating, exploring connections between meals, memory, family, and identity. Personal essays consider how what people ate reflects the communities and circumstances that helped shape their lives.

David Zielinsky and Anne O'Connor fall in love across Cleveland's social divide. Their relationship unfolds against the city's changing fortunes, with working-class neighborhoods, political power, popular music, and the struggles of the civil rights era shaping their possibilities.

Stories set in the Midwest follow people confronting desire, disappointment, and uneasy relationships, from a bowling-alley proprietor to a young bride and a professional lawn mower. Their conflicting loyalties and ambitions reveal the private struggles beneath ordinary American lives.

Michael Corleone seeks to consolidate his family's power while moving its business toward legitimacy. Rival ambitions, political connections, and the challenges of marriage complicate his plans, as former boxer Nick Geraci emerges as an increasingly significant figure.

In the early 1960s, Michael Corleone's criminal empire becomes entangled with national politics. A New Orleans crime boss's fury at his deportation creates another threat, while personal grievances and competing loyalties put pressure on the Corleone family.