Overview

""In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada."" So begins John Gregory Dunne's neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage. 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. Contains mature themes.

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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.

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