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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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.” …

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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.”

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Restless City is a serial novel written by seven respected Las Vegas authors, each of whom contributed a chapter. The novel, set in Las Vegas falls into the crime noir category, but the writers are not necessarily practitioners in that genre.

The writers are, in order of appearance, H. Lee Barnes, John H. Irsfeld, Brian Rouff, Leah Bailly, John L. Smith, Constance Ford and Vu Tran. Barnes and Irsfeld are members of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Tran recently won a Whiting Writer’s Award. Smith is a respected newspaper columnist and nonfiction author, while Rouff is a successful novelist and public relations executive. Bailly and Ford are award-winning fiction writers. Geoff Schumacher, editor of CityLife Books, served as coordinator and editor of Restless City.

If you would like to buy a copy of Restless City, drop by the Stephens Press (parent of CityLife Books) booth Saturday or Sunday at the Fifth Street School in downtown Las Vegas. The book also is available for purchase online at Amazon and restlesscity.com.

ALSO:

The authors of Restless City will be assembling at 4 p.m. Saturday at the festival for a panel discussion about the writing of the novel and for a debut reading of the seventh and final chapter.

By Andrew Kiraly

PHOTO BY BILL HUGHES P Moss in his office. Okay, it's actually the Double Down bathroom.

Chances are you know P Moss as the affable, low-key owner of the Double Down Saloon, the sweatbox punk rock dive that sits west of the UNLV campus as it peters out into strip malls and convenience stores. Turns out you’ll soon get to know the goateed bar impresario as an author, too. His debut short story collection, Blue Vegas, will be published this fall by CityLife Books. (CityLife Books is an imprint of Stephens Press, a division of Stephens Media LLC.)

“It’s called Blue Vegas because the stories are sad, or built around sadness, some of which is unique to Las Vegas, some of which is universal,” says Moss.

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CityLife Books, the new imprint of Stephens Press, has signed its first author, P Moss, a fiction writer and owner of the famous Double Down Saloon. His short story collection, Blue Vegas, will be released this fall.

“Blue Vegas is the perfect book to launch the CityLife Books imprint,” says Geoff Schumacher, editor of CityLife Books and publisher of the Las Vegas CityLife newspaper. “Moss has produced an incredible collection exploring the dark, human stories lurking in the shadows of the neon sheen of Las Vegas.”

The stories, Schumacher says, represent the work of a writer who knows Las Vegas and is a keen observer of its diverse population.

“Moss’ stories are a visceral exploration of the clash between old and new Las Vegas,” Schumacher says. “They shine a light on the hard luck and lingering anguish faced by Las Vegans who’ve been trampled by this single-minded city.”

After working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, Moss came to Las Vegas in 1992 and opened the Double Down Saloon on Paradise Road. Dubbed a “clubhouse
for the lunatic fringe,” the Double Down soon became internationally famous, drawing a lively mix of tourists and locals. A second Double Down opened in New York’s East Village in 2006, and Moss recently opened a new Las Vegas establishment, Frankie’s Tiki Room, on West Charleston Boulevard.

Despite his success in the bar business, Moss has always envisioned a second career as a writer. “No quality Las Vegas fiction has ever been written,” Moss says. “The soul of the city has never been captured on the printed page. This can be attributed in large part to the fact that writers try to sensationalize the obvious, rather than focusing on the raw human emotions unique to the people who live and work in this unique place. I believe I have done a good job of reversing this trend.”

CityLife Books plans to publish up to four titles per year in a trade paperback format. The books will be available directly to CityLife newspaper readers and at area bookstores and online retailers.

Stephens Press is a division of Stephens Media LLC, and a sister company to CityLife and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Established in 2003, the press publishes primarily regional nonfiction.

“The imprint provides a vehicle to publish quality Vegas-centric fiction with a unique CityLife vibe,” says Carolyn Hayes Uber, president of Stephens Press, “and we’re especially excited to have P Moss’ stories set a high bar for our fiction offerings.”

CityLife Books accepts nonfiction and fiction proposals and manuscripts that speak to regular readers of the alternative weekly newspaper. For submission guidelines and more information, check out the imprint’s website at www.lvcitylifebooks.com.