Amazon declined this anti-pickup book. It's on Amazon anyway.

The Game or the Girl: The Anti-Pickup Guide to Attracting the Woman of Your Dreams, the first book by Paul Pissarro, is out now.

Press kit · October 2026 · Download as PDF · paul@paulpissarro.com

The story

The Game or the Girl: The Anti-Pickup Guide to Attracting the Woman of Your Dreams (Unsubscribe NYC LLC, 2026) is the first book by Paul-Alexander Pissarro, published under his earlier credit, Paul Pissarro. It is a book-length study of attention and attraction in the form of an advice manual: twenty-one chapters with titles like "Language We Have No Defense For Is Poetry," "The Giver Must Be Thankful," and "Every Saint Has a Past, Every Sinner Has a Future." The author considers the title half the artwork.

Its opening line states the position: "Every pickup manual tells you the same lie: that you are a self-made operator, deploying the technology of attraction against the field." The book's argument runs the other way: what the pickup industry calls game is a trained quality of attention, available to anyone, and charisma is teachable through responsibility rather than technique.

Publication became its own test of the thesis. Amazon's self-publishing arm declined the book, citing a "disappointing customer experience," and upheld the decision on appeal. The book went out through IngramSpark distribution instead, and in October 2026 went on sale at Amazon and Barnes & Noble in the United States, on Apple Books, and in Germany at Hugendubel. The book Amazon would not publish is now sold by Amazon.

Pissarro is a conceptual artist in London and the great-great-grandson of Camille Pissarro. In the artist's own Wikipedia-style obituary, published at paulpissarro.com, the book appears as the earliest statement of the attention thesis his later work formalizes.

Fast facts

Images

Cover of The Game or the Girl: The Anti-Pickup Guide to Attracting the Woman of Your Dreams by Paul Pissarro, black cover with crimson title
The cover. High-resolution files on request.

Links

Contact

Paul-Alexander Pissarro, London. Review copies, interviews and further material: paul@paulpissarro.com

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