Translated from the French by Norma Cole. The first English translation of this French poet, now an influence on many young American poets, who died at the age of 37 in 1978. Beverly Dahlen comments: "Collobert's dash is a materialization of the gap within speech and the rush to close even as one discloses it... the page bears the record of these bursts of language ...Collobert insists on being without a subject, ' as if being were radically different from, absolutely divided from its subject. And like an archeologist she preserves the fragments of this ruined subject against time, to reproduce the duration' ...appalling in the intensity of their imagination of the literal body transmuted into writing." Michael Palmer comments: "She enunciates the words for desire and for loss the other words with harrowing intensity. IT THEN explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category."

    But Morphy was more than a player. He was a shy, retiring lawyer who had been taught that such games were no way to make a living. The strain of his fame and the pull of his domineering family led Morphy to set another precedent; chess madness. Morphy's mental descent after retiring from chess became a part of his lore, made all the more magnanimous by a spate of twentieth-century examples. The Pride and Sorrow of Chess tells the full known story of the life of Paul Morphy, from his privileged upbringing in New Orleans to his dominance of the chess world, to the later tragedy of his demise. This new edition of David Lawson's seminal work, still the principal source for all Morphy biographical presentations, also includes new biographical material about the biographer himself, telling the story of the author, his opus, and the previously unknown life that brought him to the research.