Given that it’s Thanksgiving week, I thought I would accentuate the positive in this edition of the Cherry & the Pit. So, no pits. Just a handful of cherries — books recently acquired for future publication that sound worth waiting for:

Editor of the New York Review Books Classics series Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of the Twentieth Century Novel, a provocative cultural history, international in scope, of the development of the twentieth-century novel that is also a novel history of the twentieth century, looking at how the novel confronted war, atrocity, economic depression, and other political and cultural upheavals.

Craig Robinson’s Flip Flop Flyball, based on the web site, a guide to the history and culture of baseball as told through infographics and illustrations.

Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean, about the philosopher Aristotle’s relationship with his student, the teenage Alexander the Great.

Investigative journalists of the New Jersey Star Ledger Josh Margolin and Ted Sherman’s The Schnookie Deal, the true story of the largest corruption scandal in New Jersey with a cornucopia of scoundrels and crooked capers including: handcuffed orthodox Rabbis, legions of corrupt politicians, brokering of human kidneys, money in paper bags, and million dollar kited checks — pitched as Carl Hiaasen meets the Sopranos.

Rebecca Stott’s Infidels: In Search of the First Evolutionists, the story of the collective discovery of evolution from Aristotle in Greece in 300 BC to the Arab world in the first century through Europe in the mid-eighteenth century up to the publication of Darwin’s spectacular book in 1859.