Christos Natsis's book The square outside the chessboard is not a chess tutorial or a history of its development. The twenty chess essays that make up the book are not even addressed to chess players. The reader of the book does not need to know chess to read and enjoy them. As the author explains in his introduction, the texts of the book "are not addressed to chess players, but they aspire to convey the beauty of the game to those who have not moved a single piece in their lives. When I speak of "snapshots" in the subtitle, I mean it: the reader should think of the book as the photo album of someone who visited the country of chess and returned from there not with its map, but with a psychogeographic record of his impressions."

The essays that make up the book are therefore snapshots, snapshots of moments from the history of chess. “Not a history of chess, not a history of chess as a metaphor, but the history and thought together with chess. The resulting texts were not intended to be exhaustive in their documentation. Following a specific mythos at a time, gathering as another Contorevithoulis scraps of food from publications and evidence, they aimed to return to the comfort of the chessboard. Their reasons were trivial and therefore, I daresay, significant: Korchnoi's mirror-glasses in his "paranoid" match with Karpov in the Philippines in 1978; another Cuba that led to Capablanca; the state of Mikhail Botvinik's teeth; Kramnik's eating habits; Kasparov's relationship with his mother; the adventures of naming a chess piece, etc. At the same time, a series of texts on the original thinking produced by the specific chess practice of chess players, such as notes on creativity by Alexei Shirov.

Christos Natsis was born in Preveza in 1984. He lives and works in Athens.