Daniel Johnson, “White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War
Was Fought on the Chess Board,” Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
For something that is neither war, per se, nor sexual love,
chess has supplied fine fodder for literature. To establish that, you have to
look no further than to classics like Vladmir Nabokov’s "The Defense” and
Stefan Zweig’s "Chess Story”. For more recent examples, you can consult
Walter Tevis’s "The Queen's Gambit" (1984), Paolo Maurensig’s
"The Luneburg Variations” (1997), and Ronan Bennett’s "Zugzwang"
(2007). These are gripping fictions, and as indebted to chess for their plots
and character studies as “War and Peace”, say, was to the Napoleonic Wars, or
Faulkner’s novels were to his fictional Yoknapatawpha
County. In fact, writers of all kinds resort to chess as if it were a sort of
communal Yoknapatawpha.