Nothing you have heard about The Game will prepare you for it. Neil Strauss reveals the bizarre world of the pick-up artist—men who devote their lives to mastering the techniques of seducing women. None of this is fiction. These men have their own vernacular and codes of honour, they trade strategies online, attend each other’s seminars and live together in houses around the world they call Projects. New York Times and Rolling Stone journalist Neil Strauss spent two years traveling in what is known as the ‘seduction community’, a secret society of men committed to becoming pick-up artists (PUAs). Through Internet newsgroups and international workshops, he entered a world of bizarre and compelling characters—from charismatic leaders like Mystery and Ross Jeffries to the eccentric bachelors and arrested adolescents who followed their every lead. He spent night after night approaching countless new ‘targets’, until he had developed the ability to connect, almost immediately, with any woman who crossed his path. Within a matter of months, Neil Strauss—once a self-described average frustrated chump (AFC)—had transformed himself into Style, the king of the PUAs. Hysterical and harrowing by turns, filled with cameos from Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise, Courtney Love, Heidi Fleiss, and others, The Game is the story of what happens when one man harnesses the power to seduce the most desirable women in the world—only to find his own world come crashing down around him. A compulsively readable account of one man’s discovery of the madness that lingers at the fringes of civilised interaction. It’s dating, but not as we know it.