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]).

The Biggest Game in Town

Humor & Entertainment

Alvarez, Al

Puzzles & Games

Picador

The Writer's Voice

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Bloomsbury Paperbacks

For more than 50 years, Al Alvarez has been best known as a literary critic with a knack for producing profound and eloquent analysis of writers and their craft. Along the way, he has also been a passionate amateur of risky pursuits—among them poker, mountaineering, and flying in airplanes—which he has written about with rare depth, liveliness, and perception. This broad-reaching collection of essays brings together some of his most notable treatises on such risky topics as polar expeditions and poker championships as well as some of his most trenchant literary criticism covering such authors as Sylvia Plath, Alice Munro, Norman Mailer, and Jean Rhys. Incisive and grandly written, this is a fascinating compilation of work from a unique man of letters.

Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books

Essays & Correspondence

Bloomsbury Pub Ltd

A key figure in the "School of London"--the group of postwar British figurative painters that included Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon--Leon Kossoff was born in Islington and has lived and worked in London his entire life. Published on the occasion of a rare exhibition of early Kossoff paintings at New York's Mitchell-Innes &amp; Nash gallery, this monograph introduces 12 works, including fine examples of his figure paintings and cityscapes, dating from 1957-1967--most of which have never before been seen in the United States. Kossoff's style is characterized by an impasto surface, built up in frothy layers that evoke emotional tumult. The volume provides such meticulous reproductions of these paintings that the reader is able to get a feel for their unique texture and surface. Also featured is an essay by English cultural critic Al Alvarez, rare photographs of Kossoff in his studio and a biography and timeline of his life and career.

Leon Kossoff: From the Early Years, 1957-1967

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Here's the paradox: your body becomes steadily more troublesome just at that point when the world, which you are soon to leave, becomes sweeter, more poignant, more beautiful, more desirable…
The 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, now in his eighties, 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.

Pondlife: A Swimmer's Journal

British & Irish

Bloomsbury Publishing

The 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, now in his eighties, chronicles what it is to grow old with humor 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.

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Books by Alvarez, Al