Reading
Reading
A Long Walk on the Wild Side
Vegas Seven chats with superstar author and hiker Cheryl Strayed
September 20th, 2012
Back in February, when Cheryl Strayed last appeared in Las Vegas (she spoke on a panel about female novelists for UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute), nobody had really heard of her. Read more »
Reading
The Desert Is Her Muse
Meet Claire Vaye Watkins, the debut author whose striking short stories are bringing rural Nevada to the national stage
September 6th, 2012
If you find yourself using “Las Vegas,” as shorthand for “Nevada,” then the masterful fiction in Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn will be both familiar and exotic … and educational. In her debut collection (Riverhead, $26), the Pahrump-raised author writes about a Nevada where Las Vegas is the place that’s “over the hump.” Read more »
Reading
This Article Kills Fascists
Las Vegas’ resident Woody Guthrie expert explores the folk singer’s continued relevancy 100 years later
August 16th, 2012
Woody Guthrie would have been 100 years old this summer, had he somehow survived a debilitating bout with Huntington’s disease that hit him hard in the 1950s and left him dead at the age of 55 in 1967. To many, he is simply known as “that folk singer who penned ‘This Land Is Your Land,’” our poor man’s national anthem, some 70 years ago. Read more »
Culture
Literary Gamble
August 16th, 2012
Huntington Press, the venerable Las Vegas publisher of nonfiction and instructional gambling books, is taking a walk on the literary side with the addition of its new fiction imprint, VegasLit. In addition to culling the talents of regional authors, it will also use local artists for book-cover art. Books will be released as both e-books ($3) and trade paperbacks ($13). Read more »
Reading
Librarian Loves
August 9th, 2012
In The Cure for Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness (Beacon Press, $25), health policy and fitness expert Timothy Caulfield explores and debunks research, crazes and advertising messages. Read more »
Bookini
A Million Heavens could do without purgatory
August 9th, 2012
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that author John Brandon “is a great young writer who can—and probably will—do just about anything.” With his third book, A Million Heavens (McSweeneys Books, $24), it appears that the 35-year-old means to give anything a try. Read more »
Reading List
A Discovery of Witches
Selected by avid reader and A&E Editor Cindi Moon Reed.
July 26th, 2012
Deborah Harkness’ A Discovery of Witches (Viking Adult, 2011) is a delightful and only somewhat-guilty pleasure. It’s like Twilight for smart, well-educated grown-ups. Read more »
Bookini
Charles Yu’s short stories offer an imaginative critique on consumerism
July 26th, 2012
Charles Yu writes intelligent and sophisticated speculative fiction with a real sense of humor, so comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams are frequent and inevitable, but not altogether accurate. His new collection of short stories, Sorry Please Thank You (Pantheon Books, $25), presents a hodgepodge of ideas—some of them only partially realized—designed to entertain and provoke readers’ minds. Read more »
Reading
A Rat’s Tale
Ex-mobster Sal Polisi turns his story of sin and redemption into a book and play
July 19th, 2012
The Sinatra Club was an after-hours gambling joint in Queens, where members of all five New York Families would gather to drink, play cards and plan heists in the 1970s—glorious times for the mob. It is also the setting in which the gangster who ran the club, Sal Polisi, a.k.a. Sally Ubatz, would befriend a young Gambino soldier, Johnny Boy Gotti. Fifteen years later, he would “flip” to testify against Gotti in court. Read more »
Bookini
In the age of miracle book advances, this author almost lives up to her hype
July 19th, 2012
There’s a lot of buzz surrounding Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles, and with good reason: Random House paid $1 million for the privilege of publishing this first novel, a figure that does not include foreign rights or a movie deal. Pretty miraculous, considering literary fiction isn’t exactly flying off bookstore shelves. Read more »
