Arnold Palmer has just died and The King of Video Poker is about to lose everything he loves.

In Paolo Iacovelli’s debut novel, we follow a nameless narrator. He is a normative, upper-middle-class American who commutes to Las Vegas to play high-stakes video poker. He seems to have everything: a son, a loving wife, a beautiful home in Mesquite, Nevada.

But aimless and depressed, he must face emptiness in both spirit and body. His relationships deteriorate and our narrator is left attempting the deplorable to fill the void. He latches onto an excessive road trip as he fixates on Arnold Palmer’s death, trying to chase a high that will never come. Falling deep into the throes of darkness, he finds himself planning one of the greatest atrocities the U.S. has ever seen.

PRAISE

"Seismic stone cold stunner debut" —Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings

"If you don't know what this book is about, don't look it up, just read it—it's one of the most horrifyingly effective twists I've read in years. But even if you do, The King of Video Poker is a masterful character study, a thorough examination of the anhedonia and banality at the root of freelance American violence. Paolo Iacovelli is compassionate, menacing, and bleakly (BLEAKLY) funny—a writer you can bet on." —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens: A Novel

"Taut and full of menace, The King of Video Poker captures our particular American sickness with disturbing precision and dark momentum. Paolo Iacovelli has written a very promising debut." —Sam Lipsyte, author of Venus Drive and No One Left to Come Looking for You

“In The King of Video Poker, Paolo Iacovelli’s nameless narrator does for today’s Las Vegas strip—in other words, America—what Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov did for Tsarist Saint Petersburg or Fassbinder’s Franz Biberkopf for interbellum Berlin. Unlikeable narrators are difficult to pull off and often reveal more about their environment than themselves, but Iacovelli keeps us turning the pages into a neon emptiness that is as damning as it is dark." —Alexander Boldizar, author of The Man Who Saw Seconds and The Ugly

OFFICIAL RELEASE JULY 9, 2024

Paolo Iacovelli is a French-Italian-Colombian writer born and raised in New York City. He received his MFA from Columbia’s School of the Arts. The King of Video Poker is his debut novel.

ISBN: 9781960988089