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.

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]).