A Direct Appeal

Thanks to all of you who have emailed me questions and comments. I like the direction this blog has taken, and I owe it all to you.

Now I'd like to make a direct appeal: please go out and purchase a copy of my book ALL OR NOTHING and write a review for me on Amazon.com. It really is a great book. I promise you will enjoy it.

The book has received rave reviews from the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, and Library Journal among others.

Get your copy today! Support living, breathing writers!

Thanks,

Preston
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New York Times: "As with Frederick and Steven Barthelme's disarming gambling memoir, Double Down (1999), the chief virtue of All or Nothing is its facility in enlightening nonbelievers, showing how this addiction follows recognizable patterns of rush and crash, but with a twist—the buzz is in the process, not the result. 'That's what people don't understand about gamblers,' P explains. 'We gamble to gamble. We play to play. We don't play to win.'

"As a cartographer of autodegradation, Allen takes his place on a continuum that begins, perhaps, with Dostoyevsky’s “Gambler,” courses through Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” William S. Burroughs’s “Junky,” the collected works of Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr., and persists in countless novels and (occasionally fabricated) memoirs of our puritanical, therapized present. Like Dostoyevsky, Allen colorfully evokes the gambling milieu — the chained (mis)fortunes of the players, their vanities and grotesqueries, their quasi-philosophical ruminations on chance. Like Burroughs, he is a dispassionate chronicler of the addict’s daily ritual, neither glorifying nor vilifying the matter at hand."

Library Journal: "Told without preaching or moralizing, the facts of P's life express volumes on the destructive power of gambling. This is strongly recommended and deserves a wide audience; an excellent choice for book discussion groups."

Publishers Weekly: "The well-written novel takes the reader on a chaotic ride as P chases, finds and loses fast, easy money. Allen reveals how addiction annihilates its victims and shows that winning isn't always so different from losing."

Kirkus Review: "A gambler's hands and heart perpetually tremble in this raw story of addiction.

"We gamble to gamble. We play to play. We don't play to win." Right there, P, desperado narrator of this crash-'n'-burn novella, sums up the madness. A black man in Miami, P has graduated from youthful nonchalance (a '79 Buick Electra 225) to married-with-a-kid pseudo-stability, driving a school bus in the shadow of the Biltmore. He lives large enough to afford two wide-screen TVs, but the wife wants more. Or so he rationalizes, as he hits the open-all-night Indian casinos, "controlling" his jones with a daily ATM maximum of $1,000. Low enough to rob the family piggy bank for slot-machine fodder, he sinks yet further, praying that his allergic 11-year-old eat forbidden strawberries—which will send him into a coma, from which he'll emerge with the winning formula for Cash 3 (the kid's supposedly psychic when he's sick). All street smarts and inside skinny, the book gives readers a contact high that zooms to full rush when P scores $160,000 on one lucky machine ("God is the God of Ping-ping," he exults, as the coins flood out). The loot's enough to make the small-timer turn pro, as he heads, flush, to Vegas to cash in. But in Sin City, karmic payback awaits. Swanky hookers, underworld "professors" deeply schooled in sure-fire systems to beat the house, manic trips to the CashMyCheck store for funds to fuel the ferocious need—Allen's brilliant at conveying the hothouse atmosphere of hell-bent gaming.

Fun time in the Inferno."