Kirjahaku

Al Alvarez touched down in Las Vegas one hot day in 1981, a dedicated amateur poker player but a stranger to the town and its crazy ways. For three mesmerizing weeks he witnessed some of the monster high-stakes games that could only have happened in Vegas and talked to the extraordinary characters who dominated them--road gamblers and local professionals who won and lost fortunes on a regular basis. Set over the course of one tournament, The Biggest Game in Town is botha chronicle of the World Series of Poker--the first ever written--and a portrait of the hustlers, madmen, and geniuses who ruled the high-stakes game in America. It is a brilliant insight into poker's appeal as a hobby, an addiction, and a way of life, and into the skewed psychology of master players and fearless gamblers. With a new introduction by the author, Alvarez's classic account is "the greatest dissection of high-stakes Vegas poker and the madness that surrounds it ever written" (TimeOut UK]).

This is the autobiography of poet, critic, novelist, sportsman and poker player, Al Alvarez. Although his family had been settled in London for more than two centuries, being Jewish always made them feel like outsiders. This is an account of his education, life and career.

This text confronts a controversial and often taboo area of human behaviour: suicide. It embraces both the cultural attitudes and the development of theoretical studies, giving a broad basis for the examination of suicide through the standpoint of literature.

Feeding the Rat is the story of an extraordinary man: climbing legend Mo Anthoine, who found his greatet joy in adventures that tested the far limits of human endurance. That passion for "feeding the rat" made him the unsung hero of dozens of horrifying epics in the mountains, including the famous ogre expedition that nearly killed Doug Scott and sir Chris Bonington. The book is also the story of the extraordinary friendship between Mo and adrenaline junky Al Alvarez - the distinguished poet, journalist and critic - whose deeply moving portrait of his longtim climbing partner is a classic of adventure literature.

What makes good writing good? In his brilliant new book, Al Alvarez argues that it is the development of the voice - voice as distinct from style - that makes a writer great. A poet as well as a critic, Al Alvarez approaches his subject both as an informed observer and an insider. Here are - among others - Sylvia Plath, John Donne, Jean Rhys, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Coleridge and W. B. Yeats, dissected with clarity, depth and a profound understanding of the mechanics of writing. Like the best literary criticism, "The Writer's Voice" makes writing come vividly alive. Written with passion and insight, it is the ideal gift for anyone who loves to read.

Al Alvarez's writing career has come in many guises. One of the most influential post-war critics, he has written profoundly and eloquently about writers and their craft for over fifty years. But Alvarez has also been a passionate amateur of risky pursuits - poker playing, mountaineering, flying in aeroplanes - and he has written about these subjects with a rare depth, liveliness and perception. This is a collection of his finest essays. Ranging from trenchant literary criticism to accounts of polar expeditions and poker championships, "Risky Business" is a sparkling and eclectic anthology from our most unusual man of letters.

From the author of The Savage God, a unique memoir of growing old, and a lesson in not going gently into that good nightThe ponds of Hampstead Heath are small oases; fragments of wild nature nestled in the heart of north-west London. For the best part of his life Al Alvarez – poet, critic, novelist, rock-climber and poker player – has swum in them almost daily. An athlete in his youth, Alvarez chronicles what it is to grow old with humour and fierce honesty – from his relentlessly nagging ankle which makes daily life a struggle, to infuriating bureaucratic battles with the council to keep his disabled person’s Blue Badge, the devastating effects of a stroke, and the salvation he finds in the three Ss – Swimming, Sex and Sleep.As Alvarez swims in the ponds he considers how it feels when you begin to miss that person you used to be – to miss yourself. Swimming is his own private form of protest against the onslaught of time; proof to others, and himself, that he’s not yet beaten. By turns funny, poetic and indignant, Pondlife is a meditation on love, the importance of life’s small pleasures and, above all, a lesson in not going gently in to that good night._____________________'A beautiful unfolding of a story, told in deceptively simple prose but with a great power to move' Sunday Times'The adrenalin still flows in lively extracts' The Times'A marvellous book... it has no business to be as invigorating and absorbing – its success is against the odds' Observer