Poker players are traditionally segregated into two groups (aside from winners and losers, of course): analytical players and feel players. The analytical—or “math”—grinders put their trust in probability, game theory, and statistics. Make the mathematically optimal play, they believe, and eventually the money will be theirs. Feel players are a little more old-school, what movies romantically portray as the wise table veteran, able to read an opponent’s soul.
Though Whitehead often repeats that he loves Texas Holdem, the variety played at the Main Event, there’s little actual love in the book. One of his analogies for explaining the game is actually sitting through an excruciating dinner party. Another is walking slowly behind tourists. Of course, in the Republic of Anhedonia, recounting being miserable in those situations may be an expression of love. Contrast this to poker as presented in James McManus’s lively Positively Fifth Street—in which the School of the Art Institute professor was sent on the same assignment by Harper’s in 2000—and you have, essentially, two entirely different dinner parties.
Family secrets fill Julia Glass’s successor to the National Book Award-winning Three Junes.
A pair of immigrant oral histories power Cristina Henríquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans.
Kathleen Rooney’s O, Democracy! is rooted in a disillusioning job in Illinois politics.
Four local authors with upcoming books share their writing secrets.
