Eleanor Hartshorne

Eleanor is a cultural essayist who has been writing about card games as cultural and mathematical objects for the better part of fifteen years, with the writing distributed across small-circulation literary magazines and longer-form cultural quarterlies. The work has been collected once, into a volume called The Cardroom, published in 2019 by a small university press that has since folded. The angle is neither competitive nor promotional. The aim is to write the cultural history of card games, the mathematics that underlies them, and the social settings — cardrooms, parlors, kitchens, dorm rooms — where the games have actually been played, with the care and attention that literary essayists bring to any other cultural subject worth taking seriously.

6 articles