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A Son, A Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game
Hyperion
September 2007
On Sale: September 11, 2007
448 pages
ISBN: 1401300979
EAN: 9781401300975
Hardcover
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Fiction
As a child, Paul Hoffman lost himself in chess. The award-
winning author of the international bestseller The Man Who
Loved Only Numbers played to escape the dissolution of his
parents’ marriage, happily passing weekends with his
brilliant bohemian father in New York’s Greenwich Village,
the epicenter of American chess. But he soon learned that
such single-minded focus came at a steep price, as the
pressure of competition drove him to the edge of madness.
As an adolescent, Hoffman loved the artistic purity of the
game -- and the euphoria he felt after a hard-fought
victory -- but he was disturbed by the ugly brutality and
deceptive impulses that tournament chess invariably brought
out in his opponents and in himself. Plagued by strange
dreams in which attractive women moved like knights and
sinister men like bishops, he finally gave up the game
entirely in college, for the next twenty-five years. In King’s Gambit, Hoffman interweaves gripping tales from
the history of the game and revealing portraits of
contemporary chess geniuses into the emotionally charged
story of his own recent attempt to get back into tournament
chess as an adult -- this time without losing his mind or
his humanity. All the while, he grapples with the bizarre,
confusing legacy of his own father, who haunts Hoffman’s
game and life. In this insider’s look at the obsessive subculture of
championship chess, the critically acclaimed author applies
the techniques that garnered his earlier work such lavish
praise -- the novelistic storytelling and the keen
insights -- to his own life and the eccentric, often
mysterious lives of the chess pros he knew and has come to
know. Intimate, surprising, and often humorous, it’s both
Hoffman’s most personal work and his most compelling.
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