The book by Christos Natsis The square outside the chessboard is not one
chess tutorial nor a history of its development. The twenty
chess essays that make up the book are not even addressed to chess players. THE
a reader of the book does not need to know chess to read and understand them
enjoy. As the author explains in his introduction, the texts of the book
“they are not aimed at chess players, but aspire to convey its beauty
game and to those who have not moved a single piece in their life. When
in the subtitle I speak of "snapshots", I am serious: the reader should
think of the book as the photo album of someone who has visited the country
of chess and returned from there not with her map, but with a psychogeography
record of his impressions."

The essays that make up the book are therefore snapshots, snapshots of moments
from the history of chess. “Not a story of chess, not a story about
chess as a metaphor, but history and thought together with chess. The texts that
emerged were not intended to be exhaustive in documentation
their. Following a specific mito at a time, collecting as another
Kontorevithoulis splits food from publications and evidence, they had as
in order to return to the comfort of the chessboard. Their reasons were
trivial and therefore, I daresay, important: Korchnoi's mirror-glasses in
his "paranoid" match with Karpov in the Philippines in 1978; another Cuba that
led to Capablanca; the condition of Mikhail Botvinnik's teeth; the
Kramnik's eating habits; Kasparov's relationship with his mother; the
adventures in naming a chess set, etc. At the same time, a series
of texts on the original thinking produced by this particular chess game
chess practice, as the notes on creativity say
by Alexei Shirov."

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