Al Álvarez

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]).

"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.

Feeding the Rat is the story of an extraordinary man: climbing legend Mo Anthoine, who found his greatest joy in adventures that tested the 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 almost killed Doug Scott and Sir Chris Bonington. The book is also the story of the extraordinary friendship between Mo Anthoine and A. Alvarez — the distinguished poet, journalist, and critic — whose deeply moving portrait of his longtime climbing partner is a classic of adventure literature.

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.

A literary critic and the author of The Savage God advises aspiring writers on a range of questions related to voice, covering such topics as writing with authenticity, engaging a reader, and avoiding common pitfalls. 13,000 first printing.

As children, most of us are scared of the dark. Although we may put that fear behind us, it remains nonetheless buried deep in places where we prefer not to look. It is a terror-as old as the human race-that survives in spite of the magic of electricity, which disguises but can never erase the differences between night and day.In this powerfully written book, 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, how dreams liberated the minds of Stevenson and the Surrealists, and how his own childhood fears provided a gateway to the secret world of the unconscious. And through a highly original and accessible account of the thoughts of Freud, Jung, and their modern-day counterparts, Alvarez reveals how deeply dreams and the unconscious color and fashion our waking lives.Like his bestseller The Savage God, Night is a remarkable, eloquent combination of ideas and personal experience; it is a literary feast, a journey of discovery, and a perfect initiation into the mysteries of the dark.

Samuel Beckett is sui generis...He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God's paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached... Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void... Like salamanders we survive in his fire.

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

The author of The Savage God turns the harsh spotlight on his own life, illuminating a life of bad habits, adventures, and fertile relationships with other literary greats, including Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Plath.

A smoke-filled room. The clink of chips breaking the silence of furious concentration. The occasional muttering of "check," "raise," and "fold," as staggering amounts are wagered on a simple hand of five cards. In this new paperback edition, acclaimed writer A. Alvarez narrates the history of poker -- its most amazing stories, unforgettable players, and incredible hands. From the first great Las Vegas poker marathon, in which Nick the Greek played Johnny Moss for five months straight, to the more recent World Series of Poker, Alvarez captures a subculture rich with legend. His lively text is combined with a colorful array of poker-inspired art, advertisements, movie stills, and photos to create an entertaining ode to the pastime that is not so much a game of cards as a way of life.

When their friend Tommy Apple dies leaving them a million dollars and unanswered questions about his drug dealings, Joe and Judy Constantine are pressured to cooperate both with Tommy's cronies and with federal agents. 12,500 first printing.

A straightforward examination of divorce, blending the objective and the personal, traces the history of divorce and shifting public and private attitudes towad divorce, and discusses the causes, circumstances, and consequences of actual divorces

First US printing. Novel by this English critic and poet.

Explores the world of the North Sea oil installations and describes the life of the men who are engaged in this business

Book by 'A. ALVAREZ, ROY FULLER, ANTHONY THWAITE'

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.

ALVAREZ, THE SHAPING SPIRIT. STUDIES IN MODERN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN POETS [CWP, 42] [PAPERBACK] [ANTICUARIO] [MUY BIEN] . LONDON, 1972, 191 p. Encuadernacion original. Nuevo.

Under The Writer in Eastern Europe and the U.S.A. A Pelican Original, Penguin Books (paperback) 1965. Pages are remarkably bright for age. (High quality paperback). Brings together the scripts of ...series of broadcasts on the BBC's Third Program...give an outsider's impression of what conditions are in fact like for the artists and intellectuals in Communist countries; Pic is ours. Private library.

A. Alvarerz, author of the celebrated study of suicide, `The Savage God' and `Where Did It All Go Right,' had not published a new book of poetry since `Autumn to Autumn' in 1976. He hasn't been a prolific poet, but as one critic wrote, ""though slight indeed in volume, [his verse] is rich in its economy."" To the poems that appeared in the earlier collection, this collection adds nine new poems, and almost all of them are preoccupied with love alone-the love of a man for a woman and the love of a human being for the natural world. Alvarez's poetry has been unavailable for too long and this collection helps to correct that.

PAPERBACK

Más de treinta y tres millones de españoles, en los años cincuenta y sesenta del pasado siglo, estudiaron y crecieron con las enciclopedias Álvarez. Cuando EDAF las reeditó en 1997 se convirtieron de nuevo en número uno de ventas. Ahora, EDAF reedita las Cartillas Álvarez, un método de enseñanza infantil y preescolar que re