The wait is over! Learn what imaginary band name won the Crit band name contest and find out the lucky winner of drinks and dinner with author Andrew Kiraly.

Here are event details:

JULY 8th ~ 7pm
Book Launch Party
Artifice Bar
1025 First Street #A
Near Charleston Blvd. and Main Street

As a former alt-weekly writer, editor and music critic, Andrew Kiraly drew on his many years of (often crazy) experience in everything from rock clubs to casino lounges. He’s highlighted today on the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies website as part of a summer series on books penned by current and former alt-weekly scribes. Read the full story here:

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.