Fred Waitzkin

The author recounts three years in his chess-champion son's life, chronicling Josh's play, their travels and tournaments, Josh's first national championship, and the impact on their relationship

The Father of a Prodigy Observes the World of Chess

Searching for Bobby Fischer

Inspired by a true story, artfully told by the author of Searching for Bobby Fischer: A Bahamian island becomes a battleground for a savage private war. Charismatic expat Bobby Little built his own funky version of paradise on the remote island of Rum Cay, a place where ambitious sport fishermen docked their yachts for fine French cuisine and crowded the bar to boast of big blue marlin catches while Bobby refilled their cognac on the house. Larger than life, Bobby was really the main attraction: a visionary entrepreneur, expert archer, reef surfer, bush pilot, master chef, seductive conversationalist. But after tragedy shatters the tranquility of Bobby’s marina, tourists stop visiting and simmering jealousies flare among island residents. And when a cruel, different kind of self-made entrepreneur challenges Bobby for control of the docks, all hell breaks loose. As the cobalt blue Bahamian waters run red with blood, the man who made Rum Cay his home will be lucky if he gets off the island alive . . . When the Ebb Tide cruises four hundred miles southeast from Fort Lauderdale to Rum Cay, its captain finds the Bahamian island paradise he so fondly remembers drastically altered. Shoal covers the marina entrance, the beaches are deserted, and on shore there is a small cemetery with headstones overturned and bones sticking up through the sand. What happened to Bobby’s paradise?

Deep Water Blues

Josh Waitzkin

Josh Waitzkin combines personal anecdotes with solid instruction in this unique introduction to the game of chess. Concentrating on teaching young or new players how to beef up their attacks, Waitzkin presents 40 different chess challenges. He introduces each problem with a brief description of the game from which it was drawn. 50 line drawings.

Aggressive Strategies and Inside Moves from the U.S. Junior Chess Champion

Attacking Chess

A charismatic salesman's participation in a series of financial scams escalates to the point that he becomes the head of a violent gold mining operation in the Brazilian jungle before forging a relationship with a darkly ambitious woman.

A Novel

The Dream Merchant

A powerful, exquisitely written tale about a charismatic yet morally ambiguous salesman Jim can sell anything to anyone. Born into abject poverty, he uses street smarts, irresistible charms, and increasingly sophisticated schemes to pull himself up from door-to-door salesman to international mogul, the father of the pyramid scheme. Jim becomes fabulously wealthy, owning estates and dining with royalty, but along the way he leaves an army of disillusioned customers broke and ruined in his wake. To escape his past, as well as government investigators, he leaves the country to become the leader of a lawless and predatory gold-mining operation in the Brazilian Amazon---an entirely lush, violent, dissolute life. Worn down by age, and a lifetime of shady enterprise, his world suddenly changes when he meets Mara, a beautiful, young Israeli woman with dark ambitions of her own. In the process of their unlikely life together, Mara finds herself attracted to this ruined old man, as if his profligate history of glory and big money, and finally his weakness and proximity to death, creates an urgency and eroticism for her. Narrated by an anonymous writer who is equally mesmerized and repulsed by Jim, Fred Waitzkin's The Dream Merchant is an unwavering look at the price of heedless ambition, the indissoluble bonds of male friendship, and the unsettling nature of love and sexuality.

An American tourist finds himself obsessed with a young Costa Rican woman in this novel by the author of Searching for Bobby Fischer and Deep Water Blues. Narrated by a man vacationing in a remote fishing village on the spectacular Pacific coast of Costa Rica, Strange Love tells a story of disappointments, unusual desires, and the things people will do when their dreams haven’t materialized in the ways they had hoped. The man once imagined himself as a great novelist like his heroes Philip Roth and John Updike. Instead, he has spent thirty years working as an exterminator in filthy basements and elevator shafts. The young woman he meets in Costa Rica, Rachel, grew up in the shadow of poverty, loss, and trauma, yet she possesses an uncanny talent for storytelling, the very gift the man himself lacks. Now, along with her sister, she has pieced together a life running the Fragata Lounge, a ramshackle bar on the beach, where their aunt flirts with the American tourist and not-so-subtly reminds Rachel that her youthful appeal is fleeting, her chance to escape this place diminishing with each passing day. As Rachel shares her story with the man, he is mesmerized—by her beauty, the details of her past, and the way she tells of them. Soon he finds himself hinting that he is in fact the wildly successful author he once dreamed of being—and that he has the power to change her life . . . Praise for Fred Waitzkin “Compelling.” —GQ on Mortal Games “Vivid, passionate, and disquieting.” —Martin Amis, The Times Literary Supplement, on The Dream Merchant “Sophisticated, literary, and intelligent.” —Kirkus Reviews on The Dream Merchant

Strange Love

An illuminating profile of the world champion chess player and political activist by the acclaimed author of Searching for Bobby Fischer. Over the course of his unprecedented career, Garry Kasparov dominated the chess world with astonishing creativity and explosive passion. In this unforgettable work of reportage, author Fred Waitzkin “captures better than anyone—including Kasparov himself in his own memoir—the various sides of this elusive genius” (The Observer). Waitzkin had intimate access to his subject during Kasparov’s gripping 1990 matches against his sworn enemy, Anatoly Karpov. As the world chess champion defends his title, Waitzkin analyzes the match play with verve and depth that will delight lay readers and aspiring grandmasters alike. Against this backdrop, Waitzkin assembles a fascinating portrait of a complicated man who is both a generational talent and an outspoken advocate of Russian democracy, brilliant and volcanic, tenacious and charismatic, despairing one moment and exuberant the next.

Fred Waitzkin

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