Most Popular Books by Steven Pressfield

What keeps so many of us from doing what we long to do? Why is there a naysayer within? How can we avoid the roadblocks of any creative endeavor—be it starting up a dream business venture, writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece? The War of Art identifies the enemy that every one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer this internal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success. The War of Art emphasizes the resolve needed to recognize and overcome the obstacles of ambition and then effectively shows how to reach the highest level of creative discipline. Think of it as tough love . . . for yourself.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life.”—Pat Conroy At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history—one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .

Narrated from death row by Alcibiades’ bodyguard and assassin, a man whose own love and loathing for his former commander mirrors the mixed emotions felt by all Athens, Tides of War tells an epic saga of an extraordinary century, a war that changed history, and a complex leader who seduced a nation. Brilliant at war, a master of politics, and a charismatic lover, Alcibiades was Athens’ favorite son and the city’s greatest general. A prodigal follower of Socrates, he embodied both the best and the worst of the Golden Age of Greece. A commander on both land and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory. But like the heroes in a great Greek tragedy, he was a victim of his own pride, arrogance, excess, and ambition. Accused of crimes against the state, he was banished from his beloved Athens, only to take up arms in the service of his former enemies. For nearly three decades, Greece burned with war and Alcibiades helped bring victories to both sides — and ended up trusted by neither. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Steven Pressfield''s The Profession. Praise for Tides of War “Pressfield’s battlefield scenes rank with the most convincing ever written.”—USA Today “Pressfield serves up not just hair-raising battle scenes . . . but many moments of valor and cowardice, lust and bawdy humor. . . . Even more impressively, he delivers a nuanced portrait of ancient athens.”—Esquire “Unabashedly brilliant, epic, intelligent, and moving.”—Kirkus Reviews “Pressfield’s attention to historic detail is exquisite. . . . This novel will remain with the reader long after the final chapter is finished.”—Library Journal “Astounding, historically accurate tale . . . Pressfield is a master storyteller, especially adept in his graphic and embracing descriptions of the land and naval battles, political intrigues and colorful personalities, which come together in an intense and credible portrait of war-torn Greece.”—Publishers Weekly

I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life. So begins Alexander’s extraordinary confession on the eve of his greatest crisis of leadership. By turns heroic and calculating, compassionate and utterly merciless, Alexander recounts with a warrior’s unflinching eye for detail the blood, the terror, and the tactics of his greatest battlefield victories. Whether surviving his father’s brutal assassination, presiding over a massacre, or weeping at the death of a beloved comrade-in-arms, Alexander never denies the hard realities of the code by which he lives: the virtues of war. But as much as he was feared by his enemies, he was loved and revered by his friends, his generals, and the men who followed him into battle. Often outnumbered, never outfought, Alexander conquered every enemy the world stood against him–but the one he never saw coming. . . .

The Story Behind THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE If you''ve read his books THE WAR OF ART and TURNING PRO, you know that for thirty years Steven Pressfield (GATES OF FIRE, THE AFGHAN CAMPAIGN etc.) wrote spec novel after spec novel before any publisher took him seriously. How did he finally break through? Ignoring just about every rule of commercial book publishing, Pressfield''s "first" novel not only became a major bestseller (over 250,000 copies sold), it was adapted into a feature film directed by Robert Redford and starring Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron. Where did he get the idea? What magical something did THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE have that his previous manuscripts lacked? Why did Pressfield decide to write a novel when he already had a well established screenwriting career? How does writing a publishable novel really work? Taking a page from John Steinbeck''s classic JOURNAL OF A NOVEL, Steven Pressfield offers answers for these and scores of other practical writing questions in THE AUTHENTIC SWING.

2,300 years ago an unbeaten army of the West invaded the homeland of a fierce Eastern tribal foe. This is one soldier’s story . . . The bestselling novelist of ancient warfare returns with a riveting historical novel that re-creates Alexander the Great’s invasion of the Afghan kingdoms in 330 b.c. In a story that might have been ripped from today’s combat dispatches, Steven Pressfield brings to life the confrontation between an invading Western army and fierce Eastern warriors determined at all costs to defend their homeland. Narrated by an infantryman in Alexander’s army, The Afghan Campaign explores the challenges, both military and moral, that Alexander and his soldiers face as they embark on a new type of war and are forced to adapt to the methods of a ruthless foe that employs terror and insurgent tactics. An edge-of-your-seat adventure, The Afghan Campaign once again demonstrates Pressfield’s profound understanding of the hopes and desperation of men in battle and of the historical realities that continue to influence our world.

The author of the international bestsellers Gates of Fire and Tides of War delivers his most gripping and imaginative novel of the ancient world–a stunning epic of love and war that breathes life into the grand myth of the ferocious female warrior culture of the Amazons. Steven Pressfield has gained a passionate worldwide following for his magnificent novels of ancient Greece, Gates of Fire and Tides of War. In Last of the Amazons, Pressfield has surpassed himself, re-creating a vanished world in a brilliant novel that will delight his loyal readers and bring legions more to his singular and powerful restoration of the past. In the time before Homer, the legendary Theseus, King of Athens (an actual historical figure), set sail on a journey that brought him into the land of tal Kyrte, the “free people,” a nation of proud female warriors whom the Greeks called “Amazons.” The Amazons, bound to each other as lovers as well as fighters, distrusted the Greeks, with their boastful talk of “civilization.” So when the great war queen Antiope fell in love with Theseus and fled with the Greeks, the mighty Amazon nation rose up in rage. Last of the Amazons is not merely a masterful tale of war and revenge. Pressfield has created a cast of extraordinarily vivid characters, from the unforgettable Selene, whose surrender to the Greeks does nothing to tame her; to her lover, Damon, an Athenian warrior who grows to cherish the wild Amazon ways; to the narrator, Bones, a young girl from a noble family who was nursed by Selene from birth and secretly taught the Amazon way; to the great Theseus, the tragic king; and to Antiope, the noble queen who betrayed tal Kyrte for the love of Theseus. With astounding immediacy and extraordinary attention to military detail, Pressfield transports readers into the heat and terror of war. Equally impressive is his creation of the Amazon nation, its people, its rituals and myths, its greatness and savagery. Last of the Amazons is thrilling on every page, an epic tale of the clash between wildness and civilization, patriotism and love, man and woman.

WARS CHANGE, WARRIORS DON''T We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in. Do we fight by a code? If so, what is it? What is the Warrior Ethos? Where did it come from? What form does it take today? How do we (and how can we) use it and be true to it in our internal and external lives? The Warrior Ethos is intended not only for men and women in uniform, but artists, entrepreneurs and other warriors in other walks of life. The book examines the evolution of the warrior code of honor and "mental toughness." It goes back to the ancient Spartans and Athenians, to Caesar''s Romans, Alexander''s Macedonians and the Persians of Cyrus the Great (not excluding the Garden of Eden and the primitive hunting band). Sources include Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Xenophon, Vegetius, Arrian and Curtius--and on down to Gen. George Patton, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan.

Master storyteller and bestselling author Steven Pressfield returns with a stunning, chillingly plausible near-future thriller about the rise of a privately financed and global military industrial complex. The year is 2032. The third Iran-Iraq war is over; the 11/11 dirty bomb attack on the port of Long Beach, California is receding into memory; Saudi Arabia has recently quelled a coup; Russians and Turks are clashing in the Caspian Basin; Iranian armored units, supported by the satellite and drone power of their Chinese allies, have emerged from their enclaves in Tehran and are sweeping south attempting to recapture the resource rich territory stolen from them, in their view, by Lukoil, BP, and ExxonMobil and their privately-funded armies. Everywhere, military force is for hire. Oil companies, multi-national corporations and banks employ powerful, cutting-edge mercenary armies to control global chaos and protect their riches. Even nation states enlist mercenary forces to suppress internal insurrections, hunt terrorists, and do the black bag jobs necessary to maintain the new New World Order. Force Insertion is the world''s merc monopoly. Its leader is the disgraced former United States Marine General James Salter, stripped of his command by the president for nuclear saber-rattling with the Chinese and banished to the Far East. A grandmaster military and political strategist, Salter plans to take vengeance on those responsible for his exile and then come home...as Commander in Chief. The only man who can stop him is Gilbert "Gent" Gentilhomme, Salter''s most loyal foot soldier, who launches a desperate mission to take out his mentor and save the United States from self destruction. Infused with a staggering breadth of research in military tactics and steeped in the timeless themes of the honor and valor of men at war that distinguish all of Pressfield’s fiction, The Profession is that rare novel that informs and challenges the reader almost as much as it entertains.

There Is Nothing Impossible To Him Who Will Try& He Ascended To The Throne Of Macedon At The Age Of Nineteen. He Conquered The Seemingly Invincible Persian Empire Before He Was Twenty-Five. He Died At The Age Of Thirty-Two, Undefeated By Any Enemy. His Reputation As A Warrior And Leader Of Men Remains Unsurpassed In The Annals Of History. We Remember Him As Alexander The Great&Epic In Scope And Magisterial In Tone, Steve Pressfield S Breathtaking Novel Tells The Story Of This Legendary Colossus Of The Ancient World Who Was Driven And Ultimately Undone By His Insatiable Lust For Glory. As Immediate And Gripping As Bulletins From The Frontline And As Intimate And Revealing As A Private Diary, Alexander: The Virtues Of War Is Destined To Become A Classic Of Historical Fiction.

THE KNOWLEDGE is not just a writer’s coming-of-age story. It’s every writer’s coming-of-age story.If you’re a fan of THE WAR OF ART, Pressfield’s new memoir, THE KNOWLEDGE, is the story behind that story and the origin tale between its lines. In the high-crime 1970s in New York, Pressfield was driving a cab and tending bar, incapable of achieving anything literary beyond the completion of his third-in-a-row unpublishable novel. Until fate, in the form of a job tailing his boss’s straying wife, propels him into a Big Lebowski-esque underworld saga that ends with him coming to a life-altering crisis involving not just the criminals he has become deeply and emotionally involved with, but with his own inner demons of the blank page.

Turning Pro is the follow up work to Steven Pressfield''s classic, The War of Art. What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and to live out.

In the Depression year of 1931, on the golf links at Krewe Island off Savannah''s windswept shore, two legends of the game—Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen—meet for a mesmerizing thirty-six-hole showdown. Another golfer will also compete—a troubled local war hero, once a champion, who comes with his mentor and caddie, the mysterious Bagger Vance. It is Vance, sage and charismatic, who will ultimately guide the match, for he holds the secret of the Authentic Swing. And he alone can show his protege the way back to glory. Written in the spirit of Golf in the Kingdom and The Natural, The Legend of Bagger Vance reveals the true nature of the game in a story that is unforgettable.

"A brilliant look into the psyche of combat. Where he once took us into the Spartan line of battle at Thermopylae, Steven Pressfield now takes us into the sands of the Sinai, the alleys of Old Jerusalem, and into the hearts and souls of soldiers winning a spectacularly improbable victory against daunting odds.” —General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Army, ret.; author of My Share of the Task June 5, 1967. The nineteen-year-old state of Israel is surrounded by enemies who want nothing less than her utter extinction. The Soviet-equipped Egyptian Army has massed a thousand tanks on the nation’s southern border. Syrian heavy guns are shelling her from the north. To the east, Jordan and Iraq are moving mechanized brigades and fighter squadrons into position to attack. Egypt’s President Nasser has declared that the Arab force’s objective is “the destruction of Israel.” The rest of the world turns a blind eye to the new nation’s desperate peril. June 10, 1967. The Arab armies have been routed, ground divisions wiped out, air forces totally destroyed. Israel’s citizen-soldiers have seized the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. The land under Israeli control has tripled. Her charismatic defense minister, Moshe Dayan, has entered the Lion’s Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem to stand with the paratroopers who have liberated Judaism’s holiest site—the Western Wall, part of the ruins of Solomon’s temple, which has not been in Jewish hands for nineteen hundred years. It is one of the most unlikely and astonishing military victories in history. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with veterans of the war—fighter and helicopter pilots, tank commanders and Recon soldiers, paratroopers, as well as women soldiers, wives, and others—bestselling author Steven Pressfield tells the story of the Six Day War as you’ve never experienced it before: in the voices of the young men and women who battled not only for their lives but for the survival of a Jewish state, and for the dreams of their ancestors. By turns inspiring, thrilling, and heartbreaking, The Lion’s Gate is both a true tale of military courage under fire and a journey into the heart of what it means to fight for one’s people.

From the acclaimed master of historical fiction comes an epic saga about a reluctant hero, the Roman Empire, and the rise of a new faith. Jerusalem and the Sinai desert, first century AD. In the turbulent aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus, officers of the Roman Empire acquire intelligence of a pilgrim bearing an incendiary letter from a religious fanatic to insurrectionists in Corinth. The content of this letter could bring down the empire. The Romans hire a former legionary, the solitary man-at-arms, Telamon of Arcadia, to intercept the letter and capture its courier. Telamon operates by a dark code all his own, with no room for noble causes or lofty beliefs. But once he overtakes the courier, something happens that neither he nor the empire could have predicted. In his first novel of the ancient world in thirteen years, the best-selling author of Gates of Fire and Tides of War returns with a gripping saga of conquest and rebellion, bloodshed and faith.

"Deeply personal and profoundly moving...An American Jew has filled me with the love and pride for my brothers and sisters, the Children of Israel."-- Randall Wallace, author of BRAVEHEART and director of HEAVEN IS FOR REAL Steven Pressfield grew up assuming he was like every other kid in his red-white-and-blue, Sunday-School attending, Christmas-tree decorating suburb. Then at age thirteen he found out he was in fact not a member of that tribe, but of a very different one. Five decades later, in November 2011, Pressfield boarded an El Al jet bound for Israel. At long last, he''d committed to researching and writing THE LION''S GATE, a book that would finally wrestle with the riddle of his own identity. What he learned as an artist and a man in the three years it took to complete the work is the subject of AN AMERICAN JEW, an on-the-front-lines account of the creative process...in all its wonderfully confounding forms.

Are you losing your war of art? Are you being defeated by a tendency to procrastination, self-doubt, fear, distraction, and perfectionism? Are you self-sabotaging your loftiest artistic entrepreneurial dreams?The antidote is in nine words:PUT YOUR ASS WHERE YOUR HEART WANTS TO BECan you shift your artistic identity--your "ass"--from the shallow, fearful, superficial Ego to the wise, loving fearless Self? Can you commit to your dream for the long haul and for keeps? In this book bestselling author Steven Pressfield delivers the tough-love inspiration to help you make this life-altering transformation.

"I have a theory about the Hero''s Journey. We all have one. We have many, in fact. But our primary hero''s journey is the passage we live out, in real life, before we find our calling. The hero''s journey ends when, like Odysseus, we return home to Ithaca, to the place from which we started. What then? The passage that comes next is The Artist''s Journey. On our artist''s journey, we move past Resistance and past self-sabotage. We discover our true selves and our authentic calling, and we produce the works we were born to create. You are an artist too-whether you realize it or not, whether you like it or not-and you have an artist''s journey. Will you live it out? Will you follow your Muse and do the work you were born to do? Ready or not, you are called."--Back cover.

Año 338-323 a.C. Varado en la India ante el enemigo, Alejandro y sus tropas no consiguen prosperar en su avance de la conquista asiática. Este decide entonces contar sus recuerdos a uno de sus hombres y dejar así registro escrito para la posteridad. Comienza entonces el relato de su infancia en Macedonia, cuando ya acompañaba a su padre a ver el entrenamiento de sus ejércitos, educado por Aristóteles, cuando más tarde ya se convertiría él mismo en soldado, luchando bajo el mando de su padre que logró devolver el honor a la tierra de Macedonia, convirtiéndose en un guerrero temido y respetado, llamado a superar las hazañas de su padre. Siendo todavía muy joven, su padre es asesinado y él se hace cargo del mandato del reino, demostrando su capacidad de liderazgo y militar, sometiendo a ejércitos más poderosos que el suyo, enfrentándose a reyes y emperadores y extendiendo su conquista a las tierras de Oriente Medio, sometiendo uno a uno a los pueblos de Palestina, Egipto, y pronto empezaría a ser considerado un Dios. En Mesopotamia se enfrenta al primer problema enfrentándose a un ejército superior al suyo, un millón de hombres, pero aún así cayó Babilonia. Alejandro se instaló allí y su ejército empezó a ablandarse, los soldados a convertirse en cortesanos, hasta que comprendió que debía seguir avanzando, hacer lo que mejor sabía: conquistar. A continuación cayó Persépolis, luego en Afganistán tuvo que enfrentar un nuevo enemigo y una manera distinta de hacer la guerra, y tras tres años de campaña terminó comprando la fidelidad de las tribus afganas. Avanzando siempre hacia el Este, hasta la India, y allí sus hombres comprendieron que ya no podían dar más de sí, que el fin del mundo por el Este quedaba muy lejos y le pidieron que detuviera su conquista y regresar a casa. Alejandro se opuso en un principio pero al final comprendió que llevaban razón y ordenó el regreso. Habían pasado ocho años desde que salieran de Macedonia. Durante el regreso Alejandro cae enfermo y muere rodeado de sus hombres. Una entretenida epopeya bélica, con un protagonista que toma el cariz de héroe y casi Dios, y que rinde un retrato completo del guerrero ávido de gloria y del hombre.

New York homicide detectives pursue a serial killer in this apocalyptic thriller. When James Manning and Covina “Dewey” Duwai are called in to investigate a string of murders, their investigations take them from the headquarters of the Russian mafia in Brighton Beach to a sweltering maze of shops in Little Hong Kong, with scant leads on the killer. But when Manning and Dewey apprehend a woman—a disgraced but brilliant rabbinical scholar—fleeing one of the crime scenes, they’re brought face-to-face with the shocking truth: the Jewish legend of the hidden Righteous Men, the 36 who protect the world from destruction, is no legend at all. They are real, and they are being murdered. As the bodies pile up and the world tilts further into chaos, Manning and Dewey must protect the last of the Righteous Men from a ruthless killer able to beguile his victims and command them against their will. Plunged into a deadly game of cat and mouse, the detectives find their arsenal of bullets and blades of little use against a foe who knows their every move. Joining forces with the rabbinical scholar and a renowned anthropologist, Manning and Dewey set off on a perilous quest from New York to Gehenna in Israel to confront a murderer who won’t stop until he’s killed every one.

Alexander the Great s campaign in the Afghan kingdoms began in the summer of 330BC. It lasted for three brutal years and proved the most difficult he and his army ever fought... The Afghan Campaign recounts the story of this bloody and ruthless conflict from the perspective of a Macedonian recruit. The youngest of three brothers and eager to prove himself, Matthias has volunteered for Alexander''s ambitious expedition into the unknown, unconquered country we now call Afghanistan. But as Matthias joins the frontline, he begins to realise that the nature of warfare for which he trained has changed. The Macedonians face a new kind of enemy and must learn to fight a new kind of war. Experiencing fear, euphoria, horror and shame, Matthias and his comrades undergo a rite of passage as they, soldiers of a Western force whose code was secular and humanist, struggle to subjugate a fiercely proud Eastern warrior nation of deeply-held beliefs and a fervent willingness to die for their cause. Simply to survive, Alexander s men must shake off the trappings of civilization as they know it and adopt the same unorthodox and barbaric tactics as their foe but at what cost? Set against the imposing, alien implacability of the Afghan landscape, this powerfully affecting, thrillingly-told novel not only demonstrates its author''s profound understanding of the hopes and fears of men in battle but also has some important things to say about the nature of wars past and present.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE WAR OF ART ...There''s a mantra that real writers know that wannabe writers don''t. And the secret phrase is this: NOBODY WANTS TO READ YOUR SH*TRecognizing that painful truth is the first step in the writer''s transformation from amateur to professional. "When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, you develop empathy. You acquire the skill that is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs--the ability to switch back and forth in your imagination from your own point of view as writer/painter/seller to the point of view of your reader/gallery-goer/customer. You learn to ask yourself with every sentence and every phrase: Is this interesting? Is it fun or challenging or inventive? Am I giving the reader enough? Is she bored? Is she following where I want to lead her?"

It is Autumn,1942. Hitler''s legions have swept across Europe and France has fallen. On the Eastern Front, Soviet Russia reels under the German onslaught. Across the channel, a beleagured Britain struggles on in near-isolation. And in North Africa, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and his unstoppable Panzers have routed the Eighth Army and now threatens the vital oil fields of the Middle East. With the outcome of the war hanging in the balance, the British hatch a desperate plan - to send a small, heavily armed yet highly mobile force behind enemy lines to strike a blow that will stop the Afrika Korps in its tracks. It is to be called the Long Range Desert Group and its exploits will become the stuff of legend. Narrated by a young lieutenant, Steven Pressfield''s bold new novel brings to life the ingenuity, agility and daring of this maverick commando unit. Describing in detail the tactics, the weaponry and the specialized skills needed for combat under extreme desert conditions, he captures too the camaraderie and courage of a disparate, dedicated ''band of brothers'' who sacrificed so much for the sake of freedom. Combining historical authenticity with thrilling, explosive action, Killing Rommel confirms that we are in the company of a great storyteller - a master chronicler of the fighting man, whether amidst the mountain passes of ancient Greece or the scorching Saharan sands of a more recent world at wara

Want to finish your novel, your symphony, your startup, your diet, your fitness regime, your course in spiritual advancement? THE DAILY PRESSFIELD is inspiration, motivation, wisdom, encouragement. It''s 365 kicks-in-the-butt or pats-on-the-back from the million-selling author of The War of Art and Turning Pro.