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I'm looking for a couple of "wordy" type books, probably historical or biographical, that people think are well-written. Something that isn't just analysing games etc - it's to read at work, so I can't get into game analysis or anything.
My most recent ones have been Brady - Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy, and Shahade: Chess Bitch.
Anything by Genna Sosonko (assuming you haven't seen the original articles in NIC)
King's Gambit by Paul Hoffman
The King by J.H. Donner
The Day Kasparov Quit by Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam
Philosophy Looks at Chess (has some chess analysis in some chapters)
The Kings of New York (about youth chess in New York and US)
Behind Deep Blue (by its developer. As I remember only plain gamescoresheets are included at the end.)
The Oxford Companion to Chess. I assume it's still in print (?); they reissued it as a trade paperback. Anyhow, it has tons of interesting stuff and is easy to dip in and out of.
Impact of Genius: 500 Years of Grandmaster Chess by R. E. Fauber might fit the bill: It mixes game analysis with a biographical and historical perspective. You can find a review here: http://www.chessville.com/reviews/re...ber_impact.htm
I really enjoyed this biography (available at the Hamilton Public Library, if you live in that neighbourhood):
Emanuel Lasker : the life of a chess master ; with annotations of more than 100 of his greatest games / J. Hannak ; foreword by Albert Einstein ; translated by Heinrich Fraenkel.
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." - Aesop
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." - Plato
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination." - Thomas De Quincey
I read the following with interest when it came out in 2008.
Moral Victories by David Lovejoy about the life of Savielly Tartakower. This book is a historical fiction novel that takes as its basis Tartakower's life. Information on his life is actually quite scarce and the author has incorporated every biographical fact he could locate, but when no information was available he invented incidents and characters...he took historical liberties, but in notes at the end of the book, he has clearly indicated these instances.
________
Chess fiction is dealt with in this note by Jeremy Silman:
1) The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (2003)
2) The Squares of the City by John Brunner (1992)
3) Pawn to Infinity (1982) Anthology
4) The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte (1996)
5) The Eight by Katherine Neville (1990)
6) The Fire by Katherine Neville (2008)
7) Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett (2007)
8) Tower Struck by Lightening by Fernando Arrabal (1991)
9) The Lunenburg Variation by Paolo Maurensig (1993)
10) The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov (1930)
11) The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig (1942)
12) The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (2007)
13) The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen (1996)
14) Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla (2000)
15) The Chess Players by Frances Parkinson Keyes (1960) [Paul Morphy]
16) Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen Carter (2002)
17) Auto-Da-Fe by Elias Canetti (1935)
18) Stalemate by Icchokas Meras (1963/2005)
19) Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw by Thomas Galvanic (2003)
20) Reality Inspector by John Caris (1982)
21) The Immortal Game by Mark Coffins (1999)
22) Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1922)
23) Discworld by Terry Pratchett (1983+)
24) The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr (2007)
25) All the King’s Horses by Kurt Vonnegut (Short Story, 1951)
26) From Russia, with Love by Ian Fleming (1957)
27) Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972)
28) The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (1978)
29) The Bishop Murder Case by S.S. van Dine (1928)
30) Unsound Variations by George R.R. Martin (1992)
31) The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
32) Forbidden Planet by Lionel Fanthorpe (1961)
33) The Dragon Variation by Anthony Glyn (1969)
34) Tactics of Conquest by Barry Malzberg (1974)
35) Master Prim by James Whitfield Ellison (1968)
36) The 64-Square Looking Glass by Burt Hochberg (1993)
37) King, Queen, and Knight: A Chess Anthology by Norman Knight and Will Guy (1975)
38) Alekhine’s Anguish by Charles D. Yaffe (1999)
39) Los Voraces, 2019: A Chess Novel by Andy Soltis (2003)
40) Under the Black Sun by Eric Woro (1995)
41) Chess with a Dragon by David Gerrold (1987)
42) Grandmaster by Molly Cochran and Warren Murphy (1984)
43) The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov (1928)
44) Incident at the Sicilian Dragon by Kent Smith (1981)
45) Hence by Brad Leithauser (1989)
46) The Chess Player by Rolf Witzsche (2005)
47) The Chess Team by James Sawaski (2005)
48) The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu (2009)
49) Even Dead Men Play Chess by Michael Weitz (2009)
50) The Magic Mean Machine by Beatrice Gormley (2010)
51) Trotter’s Bottom by Tanya Jones (2010)
52) The Chess Player by Waldemar Lysiak (1980)
53 Lord Loss by Darren Shan (2005)
54) Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers (1939)
________
I’ll wager that most veteran chess players have read several of these in his time. Titles that leap out at me from the list are Auto-Da-Fe, Striding Folly, The Chessmen of Mars, The Dragon Variation and From Russia With Love.
Also should be on the list:
55) Masters of Technique: Anthology of Chess Fiction by Howard Goldowsky (2010)
56) The Death’s Head Chess Club by John Donoghue (2015)
I’ll wager that most veteran chess players have read several of these in his time.
I'd love to chime in on the following:
10) The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov (1930)
Written by Nabokov in his pre-Switzerland years, while he was still an émigré in Berlin, it was indeed published in Russian (as The Luzhin Defense) in 1930. In mid-1960s, when Nabokov already enjoyed worldwide fame as an author of such English-language books as Lolita and Pale Fire, he collaborated in making an English translation of what appeared as The Defense.
One of very rare fiction books where chess is not simply central to the plot but is both a subject of the oeuvre _and_ a device to create a narrative. Written in a great tradition of the XIX-century Russian prose.
11) The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig (1942)
The original German title is Schachnovelle (The Chess Story) and this is a classic.
Does chess drive people to insanity, or does one have to be insane to play chess?!
12) The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (2007)
This is a great alternative-history novel / detective story. Chess component is essential for unraveling the mystery.
Extremely solid and entertaining writing. If you like something different, don't read _any_ reviews so as not to be bombarded by spoilers, get this book and dive right in!
43) The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov (1928)
This is a satire about the 1920-s Communist Russia, and chess is peripheral (one chapter only). However, this single chapter describes a not-so-uncommon :) situation where a swindler contacts city fathers promising them great benefits if they invest in chess.
Any time someone announces plans to build a "Chess City" in tundra, steppe or desert, Russian-language media brings up the immortal quotes from The Twelve Chairs.
Last edited by Vadim Tsypin; Saturday, 28th October, 2017, 10:56 PM.
I'd love to add an entry which is not a "wordy" book (rather, a short story). I feel it deserves to be there since this is both an allegory and a genuine attempt to probe a mind of a high-level chess player.
57) Victory, a Story with Exaggerations by Vassily Aksyonov
Originally published in Russian as Pobeda (Victory) in 1965, it was banned in the Soviet Union, along with all the rest of Aksyonov's books, after he defected to the U.S. in late 1970-s. I am not sure whether a professional English translation was ever done (let alone made it into any collection published in the West), but a quick Web search right now shows a site where an English text is posted.
More contemporary and not yet mentioned is The Mating Game by Jouvanka Houska. The British women's champion has written a number of excellent opening texts but this is a raunchy fictional account of the life and many loves of a female chess master.
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