{"product_id":"9781961341326","title":"Vegas : A Memoir of a Dark Season - John Gregory Dunne","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"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)\"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. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"John Gregory Dunne","offers":[{"title":"304 pages, Illustrations \/ 04\/09\/2025 \/ Modern \u0026 contemporary fiction (post c 1945)","offer_id":56971332649335,"sku":"9781961341326","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0682\/9454\/1624\/files\/9781961341326_200d7dc6-e467-4a81-8770-2371ebb4bf3e.jpg?v=1779388612","url":"https:\/\/gulpfictionbooks.com\/products\/9781961341326","provider":"Gulp Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}