In his sportive and provocative study of gaming's effect on nineteenth-century sociality and selfhood, Douglas A. Guerra demonstrates how “books and games lived together, if not as blood family, then at least as raucous adolescent roommates” (16). Guerra's delightfully varied exploration of modes of play rejects “the idea that the ‘literary’ can be cordoned off from the ‘ludic’ in the nineteenth-century marketplace of cheap amusement commodities” as he endeavors to “reorient the literal and figurative modes of ‘self-making’ and ‘socialization’ that were enmeshed in and preserved by media across conceptual divides” (3). Literary fiction grew in popularity within an expanding market for entertainment and leisure activities, and Slantwise Moves reconstructs this context to illustrate the relevance of extraliterary media forms to the discipline of literary studies. In reading both beloved and forgotten diversions of the nineteenth century as means of comprehending developing technologies of agency, identity, and assemblage, Guerra presents a powerful argument for literary studies to seriously consider books’ engagement within a larger marketplace of diversions.

Emphasizing the centrality of experimentation in gameplay, Guerra situates literary texts within a broad spectrum of interrelated media through which subjects learn to comprehend and mediate their understandings of identity and a shifting network of social relations. An 1811 pack of conversation cards control a social interaction of call-and-response, posing questions like “Do you long to be married?” and “Do you think yourself handsome?” with a finite selection of responses like “Yes, sir, with all my heart” or “Indeed you make me blush,” affording players the options to project a social image of themselves that they construct through the manipulation of prescribed responses (8). While the limited options on the cards may drive and structure the game, their significance and ultimate power rest in their operational functions. Guerra expounds, “The rest lies in what is registered by the laughter, nonlaughter, or almost laughter that accompanies the physical exchange of a card: the losers of a ‘tight’ game might actually be the winners in a broader communicative sense” (9). Fundamentally, conversation cards enable players construct themselves as “types” by configuring and enacting the available options to produce or enhance a new social standing.

Slantwise Moves is deeply rooted in materiality. Guerra reads a game board “marked by aggressive gameplay,” the smudges, scratches, and wear indicative of lively and frequent use ordering an episode of social interaction and diversion (1). Plumbing “the dimensions” of gameplay's algorithmic parameters, Guerra proposes a methodology for the expanded mode of inquiry: “one must wind itself to the rhythms of a different moment, moving things, arranging bodies, and sliding over the worn paths of now absent hands. Reading takes the form of testing for potentials, and the nature of this testing slides freely between material and conceptual domains of knowledge” (1). Sliding fluidly from puzzles and parlor, board, and word games to broader cultural phenomena like P. T. Barnum's American Museum or the rise of billiards, Guerra masterfully pairs the novelty of the situations, scripts, roles, and modes of interaction and possibility inherent within a game with literary texts, his primary subjects being William Simond's Jessie; Or, Trying to Be Somebody (1858), Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), and Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” (1855). While literary scholars have studied the roles that fiction plays in defining and ordering society extensively, Guerra situates reading within a broader category of leisure activities to demonstrate social invention as a product of media beyond literature alone. Playing off Emily Dickinson's injunction to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Guerra models algorithmic readings that proceed from the perspective that “the task of understanding historical truths lies in understanding the ‘Circuit’ or regular routes that direct their flow … [narrating] a sphere of potentials in an effort to trace the underlying biases or schemas that give shape to action” (13). Slantwise Moves is profound in its implications for literary studies as a discipline. Guerra's first monograph is immersive and joyous as it showcases an understudied and valuable material archive to propose the expansion of technologies and activities that scholars regard as literary.