Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Must-read list

What Las Vegas writers will be checking out this summer

Books

Alissa Nutting

Author of the forthcoming collection, Unclean Jobs for Girls and Women

First on my summer reading list is The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel by Aimee Bender. The book’s young protagonist, Rose, is a gastronomical psychic of sorts, able to taste people’s feelings by eating food they’ve made—I bet my husband would prefer my meat loaf to taste like tedium or despondency instead of its usual burnt ketchup with subtle notes of Easy-Off.

I’m also excited to check out Evgenia Citkowitz’s Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella. One, because it involves an unsuccessful hamster replacement. Two, because her work contains Vegas-centric lines like, “No one ever died from infidelity” (although I have done the CSI exhibit at MGM three times and it’s pretty clear to me that lots of people have died from infidelity). Three, because aside from the novella it’s seven stories, meaning you can read one a day on the can and consider yourself a literate book-guzzler after just a week.

And a perfect summer read to beat the heat is Vegas author Maile Chapman’s stunning debut novel, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto. Here you can escape to the gothic halls of a snow-nestled Finnish hospital and let the book’s chilling conclusion give you goose bumps on top of your sunburn. After Page 1, your neighbor’s skipping Jimmy Buffet CD and the too-syrupy dregs of your piña colada will magically disappear: You’ll have stepped into the wardrobe of an icy, eerie wonderland.

Douglas Unger

Author of Looking for War, Leaving the Land, The Turkey War and others

First on the list is The She-Devil in the Mirror, a novel by my good friend Horacio Castellanos Moya. He’s the author of Senselessness, one of the best novels about political tension and paranoia yet written. Also, I want to catch up to a new Puerto-Rican American novelist, Fred Arroyo, and his novel, The Region of Lost Names, and a new book of stories by an up-and-coming Northern California writer, Alta Ifland, titled Elegy for a Fabulous World.

For nonfiction, I’m already into David Shields’ masterwork on art and ideas, Reality Hunger, published this past April—it’s set up like a dictionary, from A to Z, and I’m jumping around in it, which seems okay to do.

Then I plan to catch up to the latest huge novel by my former teacher, John Irving, The Last Night in Twisted River, which is close to 600 pages; and I’ll read Jane Smiley’s latest fiction about a troubled marriage, Private Life—she’s an old pal, and a friend to Las Vegas, and I always find such rich, descriptive language in her books.

And yes: I just bought my wife a copy of the hot best-seller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, in part with the sneaky plan that I’ll grab it from her poolside while she’s swimming and find out what the Larsson phenomenon is all about, which I ought to know.

Brian Rouff

Author of Dice Angel and Money Shot

I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never read The Great Gatsby. (I must have cut that class.) A friend of mine shamed me into reading it, so it’s next on my list.

I’m a member of the Henderson Libraries Business Book Club. The June selection is Conspiracy of the Rich, by Robert Kiyosaki, the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy. I have no idea what the book is about, but I like the title.

I’ve wanted to read Black Swan Green by David Mitchell for some time. It’s a coming-of-age story set in England in the 1980s.

One thing’s for sure. Under no circumstances will I be reading Going Rogue by you-know-who.

Maile Chapman

Author of Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto

My summer reading list features some pretty tough females, including a girl character I love as much as I do Tom Ripley: Lisbeth Salander, aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Though she’s different in many important ways, including emotional tone, she is, like Ripley, so keen about self-preservation as to seem almost monstrous, and, like him, she is fascinating despite being fundamentally unknowable. Also like Ripley, she’s got a disturbingly appealing range of criminal skills, iron-clad self control, and an inscrutable moral compass; both are characters you just don’t mess with, or you’ll release a juggernaut of quietly spectacular punishment. (Revenge is somehow not quite the right word for what Salander does to an official who abuses her.) I’ve read this first novel of Stieg Larson’s trilogy, and now I have a deep, dark excitement about the two still waiting for me, also featuring Salander: The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

I’m also looking forward to Alissa Nutting’s debut story collection, Unclean Jobs for Girls and Women, described in the jacket blurbs as “glorious chaos,” “the deadest of deadpans,” and “a kind of human bestiary, if humans were programmed to go down in flames.” Nutting’s characters grapple mightily with troubles and fixations (not to mention jobs!) that are simultaneously touching and darkly, shudderingly hilarious.

Richard Wiley

Author of Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show, Soldiers in Hiding and others

Here are four of the books I have chosen to teach to my graduate students in the fall, so I thought I’d better get to know them:

The Twin, by Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch. The Waitress Was New, by Dominique Fabre, translated from the French. Tranquility, by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian. Out, by Natsuo Kirano, translated from the Japanese.

I am reading Louise Erdrich’s new novel, Shadow Tag, which seems very light, with simple language that gets to its most poetic bone, and I am rereading a little-known American masterpiece, Abberation of Starlight, by the late, great Gilbert Sorrentino.

I’m a terribly slow reader, so if I get through all six of these I’ll be proud of myself. Reading can be dangerous for a writer, another person’s book a boat we sometimes fear to sail in. I always tend to think, though, that summer reading should be a few pounds heavier than summer movies.

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