‘Vegas’ Brooklyn Launch Party with Stephanie Danler
Raise a glass with us as we celebrate the reissue of John Gregory Dunne's Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season
Wednesday, June 11 | 6:30pm
Anaïs
196 Bergen St. | Brooklyn, NY
RSVP not required | 20% off drinks with book purchase
“The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne’s] grotesqueries aren't drug-induced, they're very real. His is the genuine Vegas.” (Esquire)
Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is "a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined." The remarkable central characters are Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a "semi-name." Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had "spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby"--these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie; and, for a dark season, the life of the narrator.
John Gregory Dunne captures a low point in American culture and in one American life with rare vitality, honesty, and perception. Sad, powerful, wildly funny, Vegas is like no memoir before or since.
John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003) was a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and memoirist. His books include five novels, seven works of narrative nonfiction, and a posthumous collection of essays. He and his wife, Joan Didion, collaborated on many screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park, Play It As It Lays, the Barbra Streisand version of A Star is Born, and True Confessions. Two of his books, The Studio and Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, are about working in the movie business.
Stephanie Danler is a novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. She is the author of Stray and the international bestseller Sweetbitter. She is the creator and executive producer of the Sweetbitter television series on Starz.