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AMORALMAN: A True Story and Other Lies
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About AMORALMAN: A True Story And Other Lies
Product Description Truth and lies are two sides of the same coin. But who's flipping it? A thought-provoking and brilliantly entertaining work of nonfiction from one of the world's leading deceivers, the creator and star of the astonishing theater show and forthcoming film In & Of Itself. Derek DelGaudio believed he was a decent, honest man. But when irrefutable evidence to the contrary is found in an old journal, his memories are reawakened and Derek is forced to confront--and try to understand--his role in a significant act of deception from his past. Using his youthful notebook entries as a road map, Derek embarks on a soulful, often funny, sometimes dark journey, retracing the path that led him to a world populated by charlatans, card cheats, and con artists. As stories are peeled away and artifices are revealed, Derek examines the mystery behind his father's vanishing act, the secret he inherited from his mother, the obsession he developed with sleight-of-hand that shaped his future, and the affinity he felt for the professional swindlers who taught him how to deceive others. And once he finds himself working as a crooked dealer in a big-money Hollywood card game, Derek begins to question his own sense of morality, and discovers that even a master of deception can find himself trapped inside an illusion. A M O R A L M A N is a wildly engaging exploration of the fictions we live as truths. It is ultimately a book about the lies we tell ourselves and the realities we manufacture in others. Review "Every magician is, or wishes they were, masters of secrecy and deception. But what if you are a magician who doesn't want to deceive? Derek DelGaudio has given us a story about how and where we find truth, and he takes us through some very dark places to get there. We learn how a nice young man became a professional card cheat in a most dangerous game, we learn about magic, and about the shadows in Plato's Cave, about illusion and reality, until we finally discover that the book in and of itself is a magic trick -- one that holds out the hope that we can all learn to walk out of the deceptive and cavernous darkness and into the light." —Neil Gaiman "The old hustler’s adage holds that “the game is sold, never told” — meaning that anything you learn will cost you. AMORALMAN is a riveting ledger of one man’s education, a parable about the lines between grifters and marks, a moral man and an amoral one. Buy this book — it’s cheaper than not buying it." —Jelani Cobb “A sublime enlightenment. A disappointment only in that it came to an end.” —Tom Hanks “AMORALMAN now joins The Matrix in proving you can turn French philosophy into compelling entertainment.” —Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times “In a magic trick, the moment of revelation is essential: the spectators are amazed, not only because what they’re seeing defies explanation but because they should have seen it coming all along. The end of DelGaudio’s story has that effect, but instead of an ace of spades there’s a moral epiphany—an existential ta-da!” —Michael Schulman, The New Yorker "A boy enthralled by magic becomes an accomplished swindler . . . In his entertaining debut memoir, performer, artist, and magician DelGaudio recounts his transformation from a child who loved magic tricks to a professional card cheat immersed in a world of high-stakes grifters . . . Throughout, he creates animated portraits of the many nasty characters he encountered and conveys a vivid sense of the greed and deception pervasive among gamblers, shills, and liars . . . A lively tale of immersion in—and escape from—the underworld." — Kirkus Reviews“[A] masterly memoiristic account of lying and self-deception. . . . This is a story of unending ironies and misconceptions. That which we expected to be the truth is a lie, or at least a partial fiction. Anecdotes could be true, but falsely attributed. Intentions could be and are misrepresented or misunderstood. Good guys turn out
