Al Alvarez Book order

Since its first publication twenty years ago, "The Biggest Game in Town" has become a sought-after cult classic. Acclaimed writer and critic Al Alvarez delves into the murky and compelling world of high-stakes Vegas poker, where 'the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing'. Uncovering an exotic underground rich in ambiance and eccentricity, "The Biggest Game in Town" is a real one of a kind, deftly capturing the skewed psyches and peculiar rites of professional poker players who descend every year for the World Series of Poker. It's a world that seems almost too surprising and bizarre to be true. "A cool, precise, sharply witty, vivid evocation of a place and people, their appearances, behaviour and speech...Mr Alvarez is a shrewd analyst of the psychology of gamblers and a cleverly selective recorder of their bizarre talk with which, directly and indirectly, they reveal their secure grasp of unreality and their insane courage" - "Sunday Telegraph". "It will have most readers sitting on the edge of their seats" - "Sunday Times". "A new classic on gambling it's quite brilliant" - "Time Out". "This is a magnificent book. Beyond the straights and full houses, Alvarez has written about people who are extremely good at what they do, and about America" - "San Francisco Chronicle".

A. Alvarez examines night in all its aspects. How do we light it? How do we inhabit it and make it safe? In what "languages" do we dream? The search moves from the neon-lit brilliance of Las Vegas to the shadowy underworld patrolled by the police. We visit a sleep laboratory, where scientists try to understand what happens to our bodies and in our brains when sleep claims us. Alvarez shows how "night horrors" inspired and terrified Coleridge, and how dreams liberated the minds of Stevenson and the Surrealists. He talks about his own childhood fears and explores the secret world of the unconscious. Through a highly original and accessible account of the thoughts of Freud, Jung, and their modern-day counterparts, as well as the latest scientific theories, Alvarez reveals how deeply dreams and the unconscious color and fashion our waking lives.

Examines the borderline between night and day, looks at the emotions aroused by the night, and provides understanding of the language of dreams and how dreams affect our waking selves

A psychologically sensitive and emotionally fraught portrait of what happens to a marriage when a middle-class couple is drawn into a world it knows nothing about--the world of crime. Told from opposing viewpoints of husband and wife, it is also a moving portrait of what happens to a marriage when a couple becomes tired of the life they're living.

"Suicide," writes the notes English poet and critic A. Alvarez, "has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out." Although the aims of this compelling, compassionate work are broadly cultural and literary, the narrative is rooted in personal experience: it begins with a long memoir of Sylvia Plath, and ends with an account of the author's own suicide attempt. Within this dramatic framework, Alvarez launches his enquiry into the final taboo of human behavior, and traces changing attitudes towards suicide from the perspective of literature. He follows the black thread leading from Dante through Donne and the romantic agony, to the Savage God at the heart of modern literature.

A poetry anthology including multiple works by each of these authors. Kingsley Amis John Berryman Arthur Boyars Iain Crichton Smith Donald Davie D. J. Enright John Fuller Thom Gunn Michael Hamburger Ian Hamilton Geoffrey Hill David Holbrook Ted Hughes Philip Larkin Robert Lowell George MacBeth Norman MacCaig Christopher Middleton Sylvia Plath Peter Porter Peter Redgrove Anne Sexton Jon Silkin R. S. Thomas Charles Tomlinson John Wain Ted Walker David Wevill