The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have given us the definitive version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s strikingly original short novels, The Double and The Gambler.The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare–foreshadowing Kafka and Sartre–in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger, a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction to gambling, a compulsion that Dostoevsky–who once gambled away his young wife's wedding ring–knew intimately from his own experience. In chronicling the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character.

Dostoevsky knew the passion for gambling very well; he was under its sway intermittently for some eight years, from his first trip abroad in 1863, where he had beginner’s luck at roulette in Wiesbaden, until the spring of 1871, when he was again in Wiesbaden and lost everything almost at once.

This book extends philosophy’s engagement with the double beyond hierarchized binary oppositions. Brian Seitz explores the double as a necessary ontological condition or figure that gets represented, enacted, and performed repeatedly and in a myriad of configurations. Seitz suggests that the double in all of its forms is simultaneously philosophy’s shadow, its nemesis, and the condition of its possibility. This book expands definitions and investigations of the double beyond the confines of philosophy, suggesting that the concept is at work in many other fields including politics, cultural narratives, literature, mythology, and psychology. Seitz approaches the double by means of a series of case studies and by engaging loosely in eidetic variation, a methodological maneuver borrowed from phenomenology. The book explores the ways in which wide-ranging instances of the double are connected by the dynamics of intersubjectivity.

STOP BEING A SUCKER FOR THE CASINOS! In this book, casual and steady gamblers alike will gain some clear insight on how to consistently have more wins and break evens, than losses. How many times have you have heard people say “I have only brought a certain amount of money with me to lose”, while they were away on vacation in a Casino? This book will change your way of thinking when gambling, and will teach you to become a highly skilled gambler whose goal is to take the Casino’s money home and/or have anything you can get for free. It will show you how to improve your complimentary giveaways from the Casino. Everything from room, food and beverage, to free gifts, shows, golf, shopping, entire vacations and more. You don’t have to be a professional gambler to understand the methods shown here, and it doesn’t require a lot of time to learn or a lot of time in the Casino. Besides learning skills for Craps, Poker, and several other Casino games, you will learn a Blackjack system which will turn you into what the Casino’s call a “Highly Skilled Gambler” and fear almost as much as card counters!

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler is one of the most profound literary works to treat the phenomenon of gambling with a remarkable depth of psychological analysis and a wide-ranging cultural and philosophical exploration of obsessive behavior, from addictive gambling to erotic passion. This novel delves into the cultural, psychological, and philosophical issues surrounding games of chance such as temporality, freedom, rebellion, choice, uncertainty, determinism, and creativity. This is the first book in English dedicated to The Gambler. This volume considers the phenomenon of gambling from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, focusing not only on medical and psychological concepts of gambling as pathology, but also on the broader cultural, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic aspects of the problem. What triggers fascination with risk-taking and various aleatory activities? What are the relations between gambling, play, and creativity? Can gambling be seen as a form of social or existential rebellion and protest or even a quest for freedom? Scholars from a variety of fields, including psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, literary studies, and musicology, have contributed to this volume and analyzed Dostoevsky’s view of gambling as a fundamental problem of human existence, with implications in the realms of philosophy, religion, and aesthetics.

The Double: A Petersburg Poem is a novella written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novella was first published in 1846. The Double deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. The Double is the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky's works; its subtitle "A Petersburg Poem" echoes that of Gogol's Dead Souls. Vladimir Nabokov called it a parody of "The Overcoat". The story is told in great detail with a style intensely saturated by phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness. The novella centers on a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. D.S. Mirsky characterized the story as a "painful, almost intolerable reading". With a biography about the life and times of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Anthropic Bias explores how to reason when you suspect that your evidence is biased by "observation selection effects"--that is, evidence that has been filtered by the precondition that there be some suitably positioned observer to "have" the evidence. This conundrum--sometimes alluded to as "the anthropic principle," "self-locating belief," or "indexical information"--turns out to be a surprisingly perplexing and intellectually stimulating challenge, one abounding with important implications for many areas in science and philosophy. There are the philosophical thought experiments and paradoxes: the Doomsday Argument; Sleeping Beauty; the Presumptuous Philosopher; Adam & Eve; the Absent-Minded Driver; the Shooting Room. And there are the applications in contemporary science: cosmology ("How many universes are there?", "Why does the universe appear fine-tuned for life?"); evolutionary theory ("How improbable was the evolution of intelligent life on our planet?"); the problem of time's arrow ("Can it be given a thermodynamic explanation?"); quantum physics ("How can the many-worlds theory be tested?"); game-theory problems with imperfect recall ("How to model them?"); even traffic analysis ("Why is the 'next lane' faster?"). Anthropic Bias argues that the same principles are at work across all these domains. And it offers a synthesis: a mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects that attempts to meet scientific needs while steering clear of philosophical paradox.

Gambling Fever could have been subtitled The Man Who Must. That is an apt description of the compulsive gambler whose very existence demands that he must wager in excess . To the compulsive gambler the act of wagering takes priority over eating, drinking, personal relationships, sexual activity , earning a living, supporting a family or looking after his own health problems. Compulsive gambling is the obsession of all obsessions. A person (man or woman) will lie, cheat, steal and embezzle in order to feed his habit. Nothing will deter him. As more and more states expand legalization of all forms of gambling to raise much- needed revenue and create hard-to-find jobs the problem is increasing by leaps and bounds. The book concludes that few resources are devoted to dealing with this issue and raises the question of whether any treatment can cure the obsession. Gambling Fever traces the history of gambling, quotes numerous references throughout history by famous writers such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, statesmen, conquerors, clergymen, entertainers and others who have either struggled with gambling or analyzed the gambler. Finally, the book also serves as an insight into Eli Schleifer, the man who struggled his entire life with his demonsthose of the compulsive gambler.