Bill Loehfelm, author of the novel Fresh Kills, an evacuee of Hurricane Katrina and current resident of New Orleans, receives publishing contract worth $25,000

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Amazon.com, Inc, Penguin Group (USA) and HP have named Bill Loehfelm the winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, the contest in search of the next popular novel. The winner, who will receive a $25,000 publishing contract, was revealed in a ceremony in New York City on April 7th. Loehfelm survived the wrath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and returned to his beloved New Orleans in October of that year. He currently tends bar at Lucy's Retired Surfers Bar by night, and wrote Fresh Kills during the day. Loehfelm said that writing Fresh Kills gave him a purpose and a schedule that allowed him to return to what he calls "the new normal" when he moved back to New Orleans. Born in Brooklyn, he arrived in New Orleans in 1997. He is a former high school English teacher.

In Fresh Kills, the murder of John Sanders, Sr. on a New York street corner reunites his estranged and abused children John, Jr., and Julia. While Julia struggles to keep things together on the home front, Junior, unhinged by his father's death, searches for the killer across the bleak, haunted landscape of his Staten Island hometown. With emotional intensity, crackling dialogue and a heartfelt sense of place and character, Fresh Kills delivers unexpected and profound insights that speak to the soul of its struggling hero, and heralds a breakthrough voice in fiction.

The only time I regularly cheated at cards was playing gin with my 93-year-old dad. I stacked the deck by memorizing the discards during one game, then false shuffled so they'd appear in sequence during the next game. I also deal "seconds" and "bottoms." I did this not to win the big bucks, but to keep from being bored out of my mind as dad was, with all due respect, a mediocre player. To atone, I'd make terrible plays and let him win half of the games.

My parents were scrupulously honest and mother would have been appalled had she lived to see the title of her son's latest offering: 52 Ways to Cheat at Poker. I would have explained that the title was meant to be provocative, but the intent of the book was to forestall cheating, not teach it (read the subtitle, mom). But this is only partially true. My more selfish reason for writing the book-apart from wishing to get rich quick-was to find out the very latest about what serious cheats know about deception, especially deception with cards.

Hardly a day has passed in the last 30 years when I did not have a deck of cards in my hands, practicing shuffles and palms, steals and replacements. I love card magic; I consider it an art, capable of spinning heads and evoking meaningful questions about how we see the world. Both card magic and card cheating begin at the same time, in the late 15^th century. Card cheats quickly developed an arsenal of weapons that was, for centuries, completely unknown to most magicians. Cheats invented false dealing, false cuts and shuffles, card switches, deck switches, and stacking procedures. They worked out invisible card-marking systems, invented ingenious codes, and discovered ways to secretly gather and transmit information. And most impressively, they figured out how to get away with these deceptions at close range, without anyone noticing.