CityLife Books

Preserving a sense of community

By Mark Smith

Parhump Valley Times

How do you maintain a village so it remains a village?

Had a good talk Saturday morning with Evan Blythin, who recently published Vanishing Village: The Struggle for Community in the New West CityLife Books, Las Vegas.

He was in town at the community library Saturday morning, chatting with interested residents and signing and selling his book.

Evan is a sculptor and musician who holds a doctorate from University of Colorado and retired after 30 years as a communications studies professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

His book considers the plight of the small town that faces growing stress due to the anonymous urban life that looms over the horizon. In brief, where people in a small rural community know each other’s names and recognize the faces of their neighbors, the same cannot be said for those who live in, say, Summerlin or Centennial or Sunrise Manor.

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Do you have a favorite Blue Vegas chapter? Well the band Attack Ships On Fire certainly do. This punk rock band out of Portland, Oregon recently released a new song entitled Clam Daddy, inspired by it’s namesake chapter in Blue Vegas.

Harboring an affinity for intense, angry songs with a sense of humor, Attach Ships on Fire are self-described as having “an impressively sarcastic wit, the attitude is clear: punk rock is NOT a fashion show.”

ASOF is returning this year to the Double Down Saloon in Las Vegas for RollerCon 2010, where they will perform the song live for the first time. The event will take place the night of July 31st. Copies of Blue Vegas will also be on hand at the Double Down, and author P Moss will sign copies of his debut title from midnight – 3AM.

Listen to the song here.
More information on the band here.

Excerpt from Las Vegas City Life

Vu Tran, arguably the most promising fiction writer in Las Vegas, is leaving this fall to teach creative writing at the University of Chicago. It’s a great gig for Tran, who won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award last year as one of the nation’s most talented young writers.

“I’m really excited,” he said. “I still can’t believe I’m going to be teaching at the University of Chicago.”

Although the University of Chicago is well known for having served as the academic home of literary legends such as Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom and Norman Maclean, the creative writing program in which Tran will be working is fairly new.

“The creative writing program is a very young and exciting program,” he said. “I’m glad to be going there and to participate in that.” …

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tulsa, Tran picked up a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa. He came to UNLV as a Schaeffer Fellow in 2003 and earned his Ph.D. over the next three years.

In recent years, Tran has been an adjunct instructor in UNLV’s English Department, living on subsistence wages and no benefits while polishing short stories and beginning a novel. The Whiting award, which included a $50,000 check, helped pay the bills.

“Las Vegas is where I found my footing,” he said. “I started to revise my stories in a kind of rigorous way. . . . When I won the O. Henry prize and got into the anthology [in 2007], I started getting a lot of notice. I felt like my hard work was paying off. I felt finally that I was coming into my own style and I was confident that I had the craft part down.”

Although building a reputation in literary magazines, Tran gained a local fan base through two pieces of writing. Las Vegas Noir, a 2008 anthology of dark crime stories set in Las Vegas, features Tran’s “This or Any Desert,” about a renegade cop tracking down his ex-wife in the underworld of Las Vegas’s Chinatown. The story actually is chapter two of the novel he’s working on.

Tran also wrote the concluding chapter of Restless City, a serial novel project sponsored by the Vegas Valley Book Festival and published by CityLife Books in 2009. He had the daunting challenge of tying up numerous loose ends created by the writers of the novel’s first six chapters. His success drew praise from readers as well as the novel’s other contributors.

Although he’s thrilled by his upcoming move, Tran leaves Las Vegas with mixed emotions. “I’ll miss the unique aspect of being in a city that’s always alive with newness and opportunity and just that silly, unique energy,” he said. “I’ll miss poker. I’ll miss that easy access.” …

Read the full article here.

Retired UNLV professor’s book about Blue Diamond laments vanishing way of life.
By Jack Bulavsky, Special to VIEW

Photo credit: Jerry Henkel

Evan Blythin has lived in Blue Diamond for 32 years. For a number of those years, he knew he would one day write a book about his rural home. That ambition was realized when Vanishing Village: The Struggle for Community in the New West hit bookstores this month.

Bythin, 67, a retired UNLV professor of communications studies, said the book is a universal story.

“The whole world has moved from rural sensitivities to more of an urban-industrial kind of sensitivity, and what I write about can be discussed in any community,” he said. “Blue Diamond has changed dramatically, but so has the rest of the world. I don’t long for the old days, but we need to keep an eye on what we’re losing.”

Read the full article here.

Las Vegas CityLife ~ by Amy Kingsley

Author, Evan Blythin. Photo credit: Bill Hughes

Evan Blythin is not a cranky old fart. But the 30-year resident of Blue Diamond does have a thing or two to say about village life, modern technology and the real meaning of community, which he lays out in Vanishing Village, published by CityLife Books. In it, he explains why actual reality is better than the virtual kind, and why you should work out problems with neighbors instead of calling the cops. CityLife talked with Blythin about what he’s learned from living at the lip of Red Rock Canyon.

CityLife: How did you originally find out about the community?

Evan Blythin: I was raised rural. My wife was raised urban. We started circling Vegas to find a spot that I would feel more comfortable in, and that was as far out as she would go and as close in as I wanted to go.

CL: Was there anything that provoked you to want to write about Blue Diamond?

EB: Well, I think there’s been a nagging dissatisfaction with some of the changes that have occurred, not necessarily with the physical changes, the new houses, the upgrades, but rather the type of mentality that I was beginning to see more and more. Urbanized, used to government taking care of everything, not too much into actual physical work, which had been sort of the backbone of the community.

CL: So what was driving these changes you were seeing?

EB: I believe that on a very large level, the whole world has moved to an economy of scale. Everything has gotten big. I call it — it’s a kind of urbanization, but it has more to do with scale and size and the distance now. I mean, we’re really close now with e-mail and Facebook and Twitter and all of that. We’re closer, but we’re also further. Too many damn people to deal with. I don’t think you can do it right. It needs to break up somehow.

Read the full interview here.

Vanishing Village, by Evan Blythin, the third title from CityLife Books, is set to be released June 1.

Blythin, a retired communications professor from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has written an insightful and entertaining book about the community in which he has lived for several decades, Blue Diamond, Nevada. Here is a summary:

“Just a few miles beyond the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip and the surrounding suburbs, a quiet village vigorously resists the insistent pull of the metropolis. The villagers believe the modern way, the urban way is not necessarily the best way. They want to make their own rules and set their own standards, insisting that one size does not fit all. In Vanishing Village, Evan Blythin explores the history and folkways of his longtime home, illuminating the enduring values and pastimes of small-town living. But this lifestyle, Blythin reveals, is at risk of extinction, as the villager fends off relentless demands to conform and moderrnize.”

Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada had this to say about Vanishing Village:

“Simultaneously entertaining and informative, Vanishing Village is a hard book to put down. Blythin reminds us of the value of connecting with our fellow man if we hope to maintain our sanity, our humanity even, in the disappearing village.”

After publishing two works of fiction, Restless City and Blue Vegas, CityLife Books is releasing its first nonfiction title. A mash-up of memoir, journalism and sociology, Vanishing Village offers an enlightening vision of an alternative to the urban/suburban angst that nags at so many Las Vegans.

Richard Abowitz
Los Angeles Times ~ 2/28/10

“Despite getting frequent mentions in tourist guides and routinely topping out locals’ best-of polls, the Double Down Saloon is the Vegas institution that most appears to belong in another, cooler city than Las Vegas. With a scruffy pool table and a tiny stage, its character (and jukebox) is closer to New York’s late CBGB than an ultra lounge.

The décor reflects the owner, and few who know him will be surprised that P Moss has written a collection of short stories in his free time. With “Blue Vegas” in a new imprint from alternative weekly City Life, Moss is making his fiction debut at age 58…”

Read the full article here.

In the latest ‘Kats Report’, writer John Katsilometes, of the Las Vegas Sun, gave an advanced review of upcoming CityLife Books title, Blue Vegas, as well as some insight into the book’s enigmatic author, P Moss.

Read it here.

This is not your father’s book launch party. Sorry, no wine and cheese, and no harpist in the corner.

“Blue Vegas,” the second title from CityLife Books, will debut on Tuesday, March 2, at the famous Double Down Saloon in Las Vegas.

The Double Down happens to be owned by the author of “Blue Vegas,” P Moss. It’s an internationally known watering hole, famous for its signature drink, Ass Juice, as well as for kick-ass punk rock music and a general vibe that is completely at odds — on purpose — with the schmaltz and glitz of the Las Vegas Strip.

The setting for the launch party is consistent with the mission of “Blue Vegas,” a short story collection that cuts through the public image of Las Vegas and delivers the straight story, the dark realities of life outside the neon glare.

The event will run from 8 to 10 p.m., and will include freak show performances, a reading by the author and other blow-your-mind experiences.

This promises to be the literary event of the year in Las Vegas and beyond.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Book Nook blog posted a positive review of the CityLife Books title “Restless City” today.

Reviewer Sharon Galligar Chance praised the serial novel for taking her inside the “glitz and glamour, the muck and filth that make up Sin City. There’s nowhere else like it in the world, and these seven diverse authors capture the mystery of Las Vegas beautifully.”

Find her review here.