{"product_id":"9781961341326","title":"Vegas","description":"Author: John Gregory Dunne\u003cbr\u003eISBN: 9781961341326\u003cbr\u003ePublisher: McNally Editions\u003cbr\u003eYear first published: 01 Nov 2025\u003cbr\u003ePages: 304\u003cbr\u003eFormat: Paperback \/ softback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\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.'  \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePanicked 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJohn Gregory Dunne captures a low point in American culture and in one American life with rare vitality, honesty, and perception. Sad, powerful, wildly funny, \u003ci\u003eVegas\u003c\/i\u003e is like no memoir before or since.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ships in 10 to 15 days","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47857125851294,"sku":"ADS-9781961341326","price":32.78,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0400\/9043\/5742\/files\/9781961341326.jpg?v=1781481358","url":"https:\/\/classicbargains.com.au\/products\/9781961341326","provider":"Classic Bargains Australia","version":"1.0","type":"link"}