After reviewing hundreds of manuscripts, Avid Reader’s publicity, marketing, managing, and editorial departments chose Danielle Bradley’s debut literary novel, Crying in Baseball, as the imprint’s grand prize winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us First Novel Contest. Bradley is the fourth winner of this corporate-wide initiative, launched by Gallery Books in 2020 to facilitate accessibility to underrepresented writers, and will be awarded a $50,000 advance. She is represented by Nora Gonzalez at The Gernert Company. 

Bradley, originally from Florida, is the second daughter of a landscaper and a domestic worker. “Much of my writing is for and about my parents, about their labor,” Bradley shared in her contest submission letter. “My characters often sound like my dad, a Nuyorican bowling enthusiast who’s given most of his youth and health to maintaining the parks and landscapes of Miami. Or like my mom, one of twenty-one children, who is just as good with a wrench as she is with her gardening shears. Labor is all over my work and my relationship with it is always expanding.” 

Framed by the seven games of the 1997 World Series, Crying in Baseball centers on Richard, a retired construction worker whose girlfriend recently died, and his daughter Paloma, who is visiting from Gainesville where she's a PhD student.  Richard seems to be holding up okay—he and Paloma lay sod and cheer on the Florida Marlins over mango and Coronas. But before the final inning of Game 1, Richard tells Paloma he plans to end his life if the Marlins win the Series.

The remainder of the novel unfolds over the next six games, with the pair working on improvement projects around their Miami home while discussing love, death, poetry, the meaning of a good life, family, alienation, and baseball. “It’s my earnest attempt to find a literary form that might contain a whole life,” wrote Bradley.

 
In future seasons, the Books Like Us First Novel Contest will continue to rotate among other Simon & Schuster adult imprints. More information about the Books Like Us First Novel Contest can be found here.