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Vegas

A Memoir of a Dark Season

John Gregory Dunne

22
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Please note that this product is a pre-order. Its publication date is 04 Sept 2025. It will ship shortly after.

“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.

Publisher: McNally Jackson Books
Binding: Paperback
Publication date: 04 Sept 2025
Dimensions: 216 x 127 x 127 mm
ISBN: 9781961341326