Queer Luck: Poker Stories from the New York Sun gathers brisk, ironic tales from the late-nineteenth-century newspaper culture in which poker became both a pastime and a moral theater. Centered on wagers, bluffs, reversals, and the strange justice of chance, these stories transform card play into compact studies of character. Their style is journalistic in pace yet literary in design: anecdotal, urban, observant, and alert to the comedy of self-deception. Read in context, the collection belongs to the era's fascination with gambling, masculine sociability, and the modern city's shifting codes of risk. David A. Curtis was closely associated with the newspaper world that shaped these narratives, and his fiction bears the marks of a writer attentive to talk, timing, and public manners. His interest in poker is not merely technical; it reflects a broader understanding of American social performance, where reputation, nerve, and calculation often matter as much as virtue. The New York Sun provided an ideal venue for such sharp, compressed storytelling. This volume is recommended to readers interested in American periodical fiction, gambling literature, and the cultural history of poker. It offers wit, narrative economy, and revealing insight into chance as a social force.