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MEET PETER ALSON An overeducated underachiever, he's spent his postcollege decades doing his best not to grow up. Now, having just turned the incomprehensible (to him) age of fifty, and staring down his own mortality, this rambling- gambling bachelor decides it's time to settle down. After years of equivocating, he pops the question to his longtime girlfriend. A wedding date is set for just after Labor Day, and to pay for it, a plan is hatched involving poker and a trip to Vegas. Alson boards a plane bound for the neon desert on his way to the biggest game in town, the 2005 World Series of Poker. Thus begins Take Me to the River, a first-person account of one inveterate gambler and bad boy's...
First biography of the greatest card player of all time. Stuey Ungar was a true original, a mass of contradictions and a god among gamblers. As a high school dropout, Ungar soon developed a reputation for talent and raw nerve in playing gin. A nonstop gambler he was soon conquering Las Vegas. One of a Kind chronicles Stuey's spectacular rise as the most feared tournament player in poker history to his tragic fall. Compelling and riveting, this is the first ever look at the man behind the legend.
Nate Fischer has been grinding out a living playing poker in the crucible of New York's underground gambling world. A decade ago, as a young painter, it seemed like the perfect way to pay the bills. Now he's hit a cold streak. He's running bad at the poker table. His once-promising art career is in freefall. His wife's having an affair with a dashing book editor. And increasingly, his ex-con father's problems are becoming his own. On any given night, a bad beat could mean the collapse of his house-of-cards life: pre-school tuition, rent, and the family he loves. Just as it looks like he's about to turn it all around, his buddy is shot and killed right in front of him, and the cops padlock ev...
Juxtaposing the thuggish worlds of bookies and privileged ivy leaguers, this hilarious study of unfettered machismo takes a perceptive look into a young, donw-on-his-luck Harvard graducate who joins a bookmaking operations while he tries to pull his life together.
This is the first overview of the career of Alison and Peter Smithson, the most controversial yet most widely-influential of post-war architectural practices. From their first youthful project, the school at Hunstanton, to their final works, they epitomised the idea of the avant-garde architect, and were strongly engaged with artists and critics and with groups and tendencies in Britain and beyond. 0Structured thematically and chronologically, the book gives a coherent and compact narrative of the Smithsons' work and ideas. As well as all of the major buildings - including the Economist complex, the Garden building at St Hilda's College, and the Robin Hood Gardens estate - the book also disc...
As both observer and participant in these essays and stories, Peter Alson takes on fathers and sons, Wiffleball, bounty hunting, ice golf in Alaska, the World Series of Poker, and the Great American Novel. He goes road tripping down the bluest of highways, crashes a regular guy's wedding, and meditates, more darkly, on the kind of desperation that would drive someone to kill their spouse. Whether he's writing about hustlers, strivers, killers, conmen, storytellers, or simply the challenges of taking the road less traveled, Alson is always engaging, his prose sharp, clean, and self-assured.
He Played For His Wife…And Other Stories continues a rich tradition of fictional writing on one of the world’s greatest games. A ghost at the table, a heads-up with Shakespeare, a high stakes stick-up, a hand played on Death Row, tales of pioneers and knaves, even a celestial argy-bargy – each story in this anthology reveals that when it comes to playing poker, no one can hide from their true selves. Whoever you are, you can be sure all your passions and compulsions, your desires, your foibles and idiosyncrasies will be unsparingly crystalised and exposed on the baize. First mentioned in print in a military history book published in 1836, the game of poker quickly found its way into th...
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A spirited, deeply personal inquiry into the near-mythic life and canonical work of J. D. Salinger by a writer known for his sensitivity to the Manhattan culture that was Salinger's great theme.
A NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES, USA TODAY BESTSELLER The life and legacy of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, wife of John F. Kennedy Jr., are reexamined in this captivating and effervescent biography that is perfect for fans of My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy, What Remains, and Fairy Tale Interrupted. A quarter of a century after the plane crash that claimed the lives of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren, the magnitude of this tragedy remains fresh. Yet, Carolyn is still an enigmatic figure, a woman whose short life in the spotlight was besieged with misogyny and cruelty. Amidst today’s cultural reckoning about the way our media treats women, Elizabeth Beller explores...