"Throughout Hemingway's career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing -- that it takes off 'whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk's feathers if you show it or talk about it.'"

Despite this belief, by the end of his life he had done just what he intended not to do. In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived....

This book contains Hemingway's reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer's life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself.

-- From the Preface by Larry W. Phillips

"Epigrams" is a compilation of thoughts on a variety of subjects: character and society, enemies and evil, friendship and love, politics and wisdom, self-improvement and health, death and aging, and time's swift passage.

Inside the intriguing world of poker lies a fascinating exercise in strategy and extreme concentration--many of the same principles that underpin the one-thousand-year-old philosophy of Zen spirituality. Zen and the Art of Poker is the first book to apply Zen theories to America's most popular card game, presenting tips that readers can use to enhance their game. Among the more than one hundred rules that comprise this book, readers will learn to: * Make peace with folding * Use inaction as a weapon * Make patience a central pillar of their strategy * Pick their times of confrontation Using a concise and spare style, in the tradition of Zen practices and rituals, Zen and the Art of Poker traces a parallel track connecting the two disciplines by giving comments and inspirational examples from the ancient Zen masters to the poker masters of today.