New Publication: ‘Poker Fictions: Possible Worlds and the Twenty-First Century Poker Novel’

Front cover of Mark R. Johnson's (ed.) volume, Poker Fictions

Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre co-director Paul Wake has a new book chapter recently published on poker fictions, in The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader. The book, edited by Mark R. Johnson, is the first volume in Bloomsbury’s Play beyond the Computer series which promises to explore the play of games beyond computers and games consoles.

Wake’s chapter brings together novels from the United States and the United Kingdom with writings on the history of poker, game studies and possible worlds theory. The chapter begins by considering poker as a metaphor for contemporary life. Exploring the game and its fictions in relation to Jackson Lears’ suggestion that ‘the language of “recreation” provided a new idiom for orchestrating the recapture of lost spontaneity’ in the twentieth century, the first section offers readings of Jill A. Davis’ Girls’ Poker Night: A Novel of High Stakes and Louise Wener’s The Big Blind, arguing that the game provides a new (secular) magic in contemporary Romance in what is both a celebration and a critique of the experience of risk. The chapter then turns to a consideration of poker is considered in terms of its underlying structures, turning to Michael Kardos’ Bluff and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, connecting poker and reading as activities characterized by predictive inference and formalized outcomes and examining the tension, present in both games and literature, between ambiguity and resolution.

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Paul Wake (2021) ‘Poker Fictions: Possible Worlds and the Twenty-First Century Poker Novel’, in Mark. R. Johnson, ed., The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader, London: Bloomsbury.