The Education of a Poker Player

by James McManus

Overview

"In writing about poker Jim McManus has managed to write about everything, and it's glorious."—David Sedaris

New York Times-bestselling author James McManus offers up a collection of seven stories narrated by Vincent Killeen, an Irish Catholic altar boy, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Persuaded at age eight by his grandmother that entering the priesthood will guarantee salvation for every member of his family, Vince eagerly commits to attending a Jesuit seminary for high school. As the meaning of a vow of celibacy becomes clearer to him, however, and he is exposed to the irresistible temptations of poker and girls, life as a seminarian begins to seem less appealing. These autobiographical stories are enlightening and evocative, providing keen, often humorous insight into Catholicism, faith, celibacy and its opposite, as well as America's—and increasingly the world's—favorite card game.

James McManus has been called "poker's Shakespeare." He is the New York Times-bestselling author of Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker and Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, among others. He has been the poker columnist for the New York Times and currently writes the history column for CardPlayer. His work has also appeared in Harper's, The Believer, Paris Review, Esquire, and in Best American anthologies for poetry, sports writing, science and nature, and magazine writing. He has spoken about poker at Yale, Harvard, Google, Goldman Sachs, and on numerous media outlets, and is the recipient of the Peter Lisagor Award for Sports Journalism and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among other awards. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938160868
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	10/19/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	528 KB

About the Author

James McManus is a New York Times bestselling author. His books include Positively Fifth Street, Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, and nine other books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, Paris Review, Esquire, and in Best American anthologies for poetry, sports writing, science and nature, and magazine writing. He currently teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Altar Boy

Concupiscence

Detention

Holy Week

Kings Up

Picasso

Romeoville

Editorial Reviews

10/26/2015
McManus (Positively Fifth Street) tracks the tribulations of boyhood with ironic humor in the seven linked stories that make up this portrait of a feisty young Catholic boy in 1960s suburban Illinois. Nine-year-old Vince Killeen searches for a sense of logic when religious mandates seem to contradict all evidence of how the world works in practice. The boy is a charmer, giving readers the lowdown on everything from deceptive communion to why it's not okay to look at nipples. As Vince grows older with each story, his initial dream of being the first Irish-American pope (to save his family from "millennia in Purgatory") becomes hard to fulfill given the presence of poker and Corvette backseat necking in these lively stories. This entertaining coming-of-age tale treads lightly on issues of guilt, opting instead to allow witty cultural references and a likable voice to carry the narrative. The title is catchy, but the most memorable scenes here don't involve much poker at all; the fun comes from discovering with Vince that sin (and life, thus far) can't always be measured in Hail Marys and Our Fathers. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A South Coast Today Best Fiction Pick from 2015

“With this plainspoken, highly readable coming-of-age story, McManus adds another winning hand to a growing body of work on the hearts and souls lost to the game of poker.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred

"What John R. Powers did for Catholic boys on the South Side of Chicago in his classic memoir Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? (1975), McManus does for their counterparts in suburban Chicago … This is well-trod ground, of course, but McManus enlivens the familiar material with zesty prose that goes beyond the jokes to capture that ever-melancholy transition from innocence to experience." —Booklist

“In writing about poker Jim McManus has managed to write about everything, and it’s glorious.” —David Sedaris

"McManus has captured a Chicago Catholic kid's universe with an accuracy that made me laugh. A royal flush. Bravo!" —Sandra Cisneros

"Reading The Education of a Poker Player, I realized I had completely forgotten what it had been like to be a boy. McManus remembers it exactly. There are many things to admire—the delights of the Kennedy era Catholic household, the movement of a mind through time—but what stuck with me most was how McManus nails it dead: being a kid isn't anything like being an adult. Instead it is something stranger, something wilder, and something we shouldn't forget. Consumed with desire for girls, a place in the clergy, and a secret obsession with a certain gambling game that is played with 52 cards, McManus's narrator will help you reclaim something you may have lost. Pick up this book." —Jesse Ball

"The Education of a Poker Player is a thoroughly refreshing read, and you know that with McManus you're going to get an engaging journey. McManus has been there and done it, and he certainly speaks with the voice of experience." —Sam Marsden, Jackpot.co.uk

“When McManus writes about the social dynamics of teenage boys he is hilarious and dazzling. This poignancy continues throughout the book’s second half as Vince becomes more emotionally complex. McManus’ writing is often brilliant — especially on baseball, poker, Catholic arcana, the juvenile humor of young men, and impressionable interactions between the young and authority.” —Alex Lemon, Dallas Morning News

"This entertaining coming-of-age tale treads lightly on issues of guilt, opting instead to allow witty cultural references and a likable voice to carry the narrative....the most memorable scenes here don't involve much poker at all; the fun comes from discovering with Vince that sin (and life, thus far) can't always be measured in Hail Marys and Our Fathers." —Publishers Weekly

"Overall The Education of a Poker Player isn’t going to make you a better card player....What it will give you is a little better appreciation of the game, perhaps a remembrance of how you got your start, and bring a smile to your face as you relive those memories." —Earl Burton, Poker News Daily

"[T]he framework here...reminded me James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as it follows one boy, Vincent Killeen, from ages 9 to 17 growing up in the Catholic Church. Like Artist, you get the sense Vincent is McManus’s alter ego — “altar” ego? — and, like Artist, the voice matures as the narrator ages." —Lauren Daley, South Coast Today

"McManus is a great novelist and poet. His stories are deeply humorous and stunningly insightful, finely crafted, and filled with phrases to be savored."
—Aaron Brown, Wilmott Magazine

“When McManus writes about the social dynamics of teenage boys he is hilarious and dazzling. This poignancy continues throughout the book’s second half as Vince becomes more emotionally complex. McManus’ writing is often brilliant — especially on baseball, poker, Catholic arcana, the juvenile humor of young men and impressionable interactions between the young and authority.” —Alex Lemons, Dallas Morning News

From the Publisher

★ 2015-07-20
A boy copes with Catholicism, nuns, and such forbidden fruit as girls and gambling in a collection of closely related stories.In these seven probably autobiographical tales, McManus (Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, 2010, etc.) follows the thoughts and urges of Vincent Killeen as he ages from 9 to 17 in the 1950s and '60s. Vince is initially devout enough to feel he may have a "calling" to the priesthood, which would delight his grandmother and spare the entire family any time in purgatory, according to Catholic lore. He also appreciates baseball and language, tales of an older relative's hitch in the navy, the provocative lyrics of "Louie Louie," the sight of Laura Langan's bare legs two pews ahead of him at Sunday Mass, and the first inklings of his skill at poker. McManus' writing is deceptively artless: mundane details related in Vince's slowly maturing voice track the unexceptional life of a middle-class Irish-American Catholic family in a Chicago suburb, with the obligatory JFK portrait on the wall and the obliging production of numerous offspring. Yet the author gradually forms these common facets of simple people into a sharp, intimate portrait of an intelligent, inquiring mind embracing, then questioning, and inevitably pulling away from the beliefs and strictures of home life. McManus, a novelist and nonfiction writer, has played poker for high stakes in Las Vegas, and in Positively Fifth Street (2003), he wrote a classic about the game with riveting descriptions of poker hands. He achieves that again here in two sessions that have Vince facing very different opponents and challenges. The ironic and irreverent humor mined from Catholic arcana may bemuse the uninitiated, and anyone might question the author's impulse to catalog Vince's every erection. But then Catholics probably had little problem with the parallel challenges of Portnoy's Complaint.With this plainspoken, highly readable coming-of-age story, McManus adds another winning hand to a growing body of work on the hearts and souls lost to the game of poker.

Kirkus Reviews