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Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
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I admit it. Despite the many stereotypes that surround chess players, I find them – us – endlessly fascinating. Sure, tell me why your Knight sacrifice shouldn’t have worked – but tell me, too, about the look on your opponent’s face when he saw the move. Did he really just leave his clock running and exit the Club? How did your team captain respond to your unexpected win? What did that life-master say to you afterwards – why was she chuckling? Who was it that you left with shortly thereafter? Apologies to Barbara Streisand (a school mate of Bobby Fischer, by the way) but it seems to me that Chess people who need chess people are the luckiest people in the world... Howard Goldowsky feeds this passion with his Engaging Pieces, serving up Interviews and Prose for the Chess Fan. He has collected his writings from Chess Life, Chess Café, Chess Horizons, Squares and The Chess Journalist, added a few new ones, and produced a kaleidoscopic look at those – real and imagined – on the (mostly) American chess scene who involve themselves in this thing we call a game, an art, a sport, a struggle… Goldowsky’s interviewees include –
Goldowsky is not engaging in attack journalism in Engaging Pieces – the author lets his interviewees tell their stories, so he sets up his questions and pretty much gets out of the way. It’s fair to say that club players who wants to be au courant in casual chess discussions will be able to keep up if they’ve read these “conversations” (and their postscripts) especially if they follows up with the related books.
The second part of Engaging
Pieces contains a half-dozen short stories,
mostly about attempted mates, which had me raising an eyebrow like The
American in “Chess” the musical – but “A Conversation with Anthony
Meters, America’s Fastest Improving IM” was
quite funny, and doubly so when I read some of the offended responses that
Goldowsky included at the end of the chapter. The third part of the book includes four “opinion” pieces, including reviews of the movie “Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine” and written collaboration of Anatoly Karpov , Jean-François Phelizon and Bachar Kouatly, Chess and the Art of Negotiation. In addition, “A Bibliography of Contemporary Chess Fiction” is a very pleasant find: a list of English language novels and literary anthologies from 1933 to 2007 where “chess contributes significantly to the plot or characterizes at least one main character.” Daowood & Brighton is a small publisher. Engaging Pieces is to date its only title (although the D&B website promises an Anthology of Chess Fiction for 2008). Hats off to Andrew Kieckman, who designed, illustrated and laid out Goldowsky’s book to make it quite readable. The “pieces” sell the book, but the cover will get you to pick it up and start thumbing through. Engaging Pieces is a pleasant read. I hope the author is already hard at work on a second collection.
Editor's Note: The following is apparently
from the book's author: "I compiled this book for the same
reason I began writing about chess in the first place: I wanted to share my
curiosity about the cultural, social, and competitive nature of the game.
Thus, the topics running through these pages include complex, contemporary
issues that I wanted to make accessible to the public. Some of these topics
include the details of chess rating systems, the interaction of artificial
intelligence with chess computers, the relationship between feminism and
women’s chess, the marketing and promotion of chess, and the question of
whether or not chess is a sport. Simply put, I’m a chess fan. Each article
and story represents the type of in-depth and entertaining chess writing
that I, and other chess fans, deserve to read."
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The
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Jennifer
Shahade, Women’s Grandmaster, twice American women’s chess champion and
author of the spunky and sassy 
