Brothers in an Unforgiving Environment—Car Tag by Acclaimed Author H. Lee Barnes

Las Vegas, NV – January 12, 2012 – From the desert to the glittering promise of Las Vegas, Nevada has long been the backdrop for heartbreak and broken dreams. Everyone is susceptible to the traps and temptations, but some families make it easy to give in. Award-winning H. Lee Barnes chronicles the Debecki sons in his latest novel Car Tag (Virginia Avenue Press) with devastating honesty.

“Their boyhood wasn’t recorded, not the way that some families preserve moments and events. That, he reminded himself, is because there were so few events. They fabricated their own growing-up experiences through mischief, daring, and a little petty larceny.”

In what may be the quintessential Nevada novel, the reader re-lives the chaotic childhood of the Debecki brothers, while the story weaves in the present-day consequences. Younger Billy Debecki has killed a rural police officer; big brother Drew is a police officer on the Los Vegas police force trying to spare Billy the death penalty. The story plays out against a background so vividly drawn it might be a character in its own right.  Moving from the open desert near Rhyolite, Nevada to the Nevada Supreme Court, Car Tag probes the ambiguities of the death penalty while exploring the complexities of family life. Ultimately the story is revealed to be a mystery shrouded by time and grief, with Barnes skillfully showing us how the chords of memory are stretched thin through time and tragedy but maintain a connection that might save Billy’s life.

Barnes sees an enormous potential for untapped literary resources in his home state. “I really think the parts that have to be explored about Nevada are the parts in between — the trailer communities out in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “Maybe these little places are the last vestiges of the Old West, where the maverick spirit that first brought people here still exists; I’d like to think that they’re populated by people who embrace the idea of escaping the shackles of life in urban and suburban settings.”

About the Author: H. Lee Barnes lives and writes in Las Vegas, where he teaches English and creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada. In his past lives, he was a soldier, a deputy sheriff, a narcotics agent, a casino dealer, and a martial arts instructor. His short stories have won the Willamette and the Arizona Authors Association fiction awards. Gunning for Ho, his first collection of short stories, was a finalist for the Stephen Turner First Fiction Award offered by the Texas Institute of Letters. In 2009 he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

Purchase the book here.

Laufer, Peter and Sheila Swan Laufer.  Neon Nevada.  Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2011, 128 pages, $16.95 (hardcover)—“Neon is associated with the highest aspirations of the American dream as well as the lowest manifestations of commercialism and banality,” Lili Lakich, the founding director of the Museum of Neon Art in Las Angeles, writes in the foreword to Peter Laufer and Sheila Swan Laufer’s book Neon Nevada. “No other medium so aptly expresses the American spirit.”

To those who do not follow neon art closely, this could very well seem to be a heady introduction.  It might leave questions of how and why such assertions could be made.  Throughout the 100-plus pages of this book of photographs and brief essays on the culture and art of neon in Nevada, the authors do their level best to prove the accuracy of Ms. Lakich’s soaring prose.

The latest version of Neon Nevada is a follow up to a previous version published in 1994 by the University of Nevada Press to wide acclaim.  Their concept from the beginning was to drive the state, photograph the neon gems, and interview fellow aficionados around the state, a process they repeated again for the second version.  This version, the latest, captures the differences in Nevada’s neon culture nearly two decades later, during a time when Nevada’s urban centers and rural areas have gone through both enormous growth and an incredible economic downturn, all of which is reflected in their neon. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest issue of Nevada in the West Magazine, Fall 2011 (Vol. 2, No. 3), is out in bookstores and in mailboxes now.  We reviewed the first few issues in a previous issue of The Nevada Review, and spoke glowingly of our good friends there at the magazine who do so much for literature and history in our state.

The magazine, which started shortly after we launched our journal, has been great to us over the years, and has been able to do many things that we haven’t.  Here is how I described it in my review:

Nevada in the West is a glossy and well-designed magazine dedicated to the history and splendor of Nevada. Issued quarterly, its editorial focus spans the State, covering all aspects of Nevada’s history through a variety of genres, including reviews, interviews, essays, scholarly articles, and announcements. Additionally, because of the magazine’s focus on presenting the excellent content in most appealing manner possible, all of the content is complemented by historic and contemporary photography.

Take a look at the contents for the latest issue below, and be sure to pick up a copy and see all of the other interesting items that aren’t included below:

• Atomic Cheeseheads The Nevada Test Site and Las Vegas in the 1950s, by Aaron McArthur
• The Liberty Belle – A Reno Landmark, by Marshall A. Fey
• Tonopah, Nevada, Mining Disaster of 1911, by William J. Metscher
• The IRA and “Indian New Deal” in Nevada, by Shayne Del Cohen
• Lake Tahoe’s Thunderbird Lodge Historic Site, by Bill Watson
• Japanese Balloon Bombs Over Nevada During World War II, by Chuck Weller
• Jean McElrath Remembered, by Milton L. Sharp
• Phyllis Bendure and the Pentagon Patches, by Ken Beaton

By Richard Menzies

The editors have asked me to expand upon my assertion that Winnemucca is the Florence of Northern Nevada—a daunting assignment in view of the fact I have recently returned from Firenza, where I stayed for a time at the Hotel La Gioconda, famous because it was briefly the hideout for an art thief who 1911 made off with the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece popularly known as the Mona Lisa.

As someone who also takes pictures, I slept fitfully.  Not because I feared the Arma dei Carabiniaeri were closing in, but because the mattress was quite lumpy.  The furnishings and bathroom fixtures were old, perhaps even older than those at my cabinette at the Scott Shady Court in Winnemucca, where I always choose to stay—not because it ‘s deluxe but because it just oozes character.  Next door is unit 61 that the ageless desk clerk Louise routinely assigns to the acclaimed San Francisco photographer Mark Citret.  Like me, Citret is enamored with the Shady Court.  An ethereal picture he shot inside the court’s enclosed swimming pool is featured in his book Along The Way.  More recently, Mark has trained his camera on the table flatware at Winnemucca’s excellent breakfast eatery The Griddle.

I know Mark because we’ve both been featured speakers at Winnemucca’s annual photography symposium, Shooting The West.  It is through STW that I’ve rubbed shoulders with a number of famous photographers and come to admire a community that otherwise I might have just driven through, or around, since Winnemucca, like most towns along the old Emigrant Trail, has been bypassed by the Interstate.  Bear in mind that my impressions are those of a seasonal visitor and not those of someone who lives and works there.  And, speaking as a tourist, my impression of Winnemucca is indeed similar to my impression of Florence; i.e., “Wow, how different everything around here is!” Read the rest of this entry »

Barnes, H. Lee.  When We Walked Above the Clouds: A Memoir of Vietnam. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.  299 pages, $29.95—It is almost a requirement that wartime memoirs come loaded with pictures: pictures of the author, pictures of the people discussed in its pages, and pictures of the local landscape.  Every reader wants to know what the enemy and the locals look like, what soldiers who are only known by nicknames and last names could really look like within their context, and what natural barriers they are up against.  It is so common in fact, that the absence of pictures in H. Lee Barnes’ extraordinary wartime memoir, When We Walked Above the Clouds: A Memoir of Vietnam (University of Nebraska Press, $29.95), seems to suggest that Barnes is trying to do something different with his book.

Barnes starts his memoir from his difficult childhood and ends it in the deadly and rigorous jungles of Vietnam, the half-century that elapsed allowing the memories of both to settle.  As a kid, his blended family followed his stepfather from broadcast job to broadcast job around the west and southwest.  The brutal life lessons, or the man who delivered them, forced the young H. Lee Barnes to decide to define manhood in his own way: as a soldier who accepts the hardest challenges and excels at them.  First it was joining the military without waiting for the draft.  Then it was qualifying for Special Forces training and the vaunted Green Berets.  Finally, it was volunteering for Vietnam when the low-intensity conflict was the only game in town.

Before the real troop buildup in the mid-1906s, Barnes and his team deployed to a mountainous outpost named Tra Bong.  As one of the youngest on the team, Barnes was relegated to the jobs no one else wanted or would do: cleaning, building, dealing with waste, and working on the team’s weapons.  In addition to not being fully accepted into the inner circle of his team, he also was an outsider with respect to the hodgepodge of inhabitants in their encampment, from Aussies to Montagnards.  But, as with many long-term military deployments, Barnes was able to rise to the inner circle by both proving his competence and becoming one of the team’s old timers due to the high personnel turnover for a team in country.  In other words, for a young soldier trying to define and prove his manhood, it was an ideal scenario. Read the rest of this entry »

The great Don Waters, who hales from Reno, has published in The Nevada Review, and whose collection of short stories, Desert Gothic, is one of the best books set in Nevada you will ever read, was recently interviewed in Ploughshares.  Congratulations to Don for all of his success in and out of the literary world.

Susan Skorupa from the RGJ recently wrote a review of The Short, Short Hitchhiker.  Read it here.

J. Patrick Coolican from the Las Vegas Sun writes sort of a review for Andrew Kiraly’s Crit, which I reviewed below giving it some praise but saying that there is still room for the quintessential Las Vegas novel to be written.

Take a look at these items from the Las Vegas review Journal, some of my favorite parts of their paper every week or so.  Book Nook, Book Briefs, Bookmark, and Literary Las Vegas.

The RGJ ran these interesting items on the beginning of the town of Tonopah last week, which are well worth the read.

Susan Skorupa reviews a book by a young Nevada author.

The Guardian (UK) posts a piece about the 10 best Las Vegas books ever written.

The LVRJ is reporting that a memorial will be held on Friday for Maryellen Sadovich, a distinguished and important Nevada historian. She was the author of The Mysterious Valley, a history of Caliente and the surrounding part of Lincoln County, and was a key mover in several historical movements and museum efforts throughout the state. Be sure and read the whole obituary here.

Neon Nevada, a new photo and commentary book published by Globe Pequot Press, was recently released.

Kiraly, Andrew.  Crit.  Las Vegas: CityLife Books, 2011.  202 pages, $14.96—Hambert Larkin is the worst of Las Vegas culture.  A nightclub act, he sings covers poorly, dances worse, and wears unfashionable clothes.  Perhaps worst of all in Las Vegas, he performs his kitsch at a low-end venue largely inhabited by locals.  Gabe Sack is the worst of today’s popular culture.  A music reviewer, he hides behind the moniker Le Connoisseur and writes venomous music reviews for the fictitious Los Angeles pop culture magazine Bang Bang.  Both characters allow author Andrew Kiraly to explore the central question of Crit, his latest novel: is it worse to know you are a hack and not care, or to care and be oblivious to it?

To explore this question, he introduces Gabe’s two calling cards.  The first is his clever eviscerations of every compact disk that crosses his desk (with the exception of a copy of the once-ubiquitous AOL promotional disks).  Although he is a music snob, he shows no regard for the band or the music, and no mercy for those who dared to create it.  He merely spews contempt at every unworthy new addition to the Los Angeles rock scene in every way that he possibly can.  Not surprisingly, his other calling card is a black eye from getting punched after being recognized as the writer of those same reviews.

Early in the book, he receives a fresh black eye moments after he drunkenly announces that he is quitting writing his notoriously vapid reviews, revealing an introspection that is not common for him.  This introspection does not last long, though.  His impulsive desire to quit is not preceded or closely followed by a fallback plan, a greater opportunity to pursue, or anything else beyond his initial declaration.  He merely knows that he is through with writing destructive reviews and through getting punched for them.  Before he can leave the business, though, his boss deploys him on one last hit piece: he is to track down the legendary Hambert Larkin, who he had seen years before in Las Vegas, and review his act as only Le Connoisseur could.

Because Larkin’s show is all that stands between Gabe and the desired end of his career, he accepts the challenge.  He enlists the help of his best friend, Staley, another music connoisseur, for his ride across the desert from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.  The perfect road trip was destined for greatness as Gabe planned it, like Hunter S. Thompson returning to write a follow up on the Mint 400 a few years after the release of Fear and Loathing. But Staley brings his young girlfriend, Darcy, along for the ride, complicating the trip because of her history with Gabe. Read the rest of this entry »

The fine people over at Moonshine Ink, Tahoe and Truckee’s favorite source for news, published a pretty incredible review essay on our book, The Short, Short Hitchhiker earlier this month.  Unlike a lot of reviews, this one really digs into the essence of Stanley’s book.  David Bunker, the columnist who reviewed it, compares it to the latest Steve Jobs biography, the name of which I can’t recall, contrasting Stanley’s humanity with that of Mr. Jobs.

We here at Virginia Avenue Press and the Nevada Review have believed in this book since we first read the manuscript last year.  It is just so gripping, so stunningly authentic, and so powerful that we knew we would just have to publish it.  Even so, it is always nice to know that others like Mr. Bunker agree with our initial assessment.  There are more reviews on the way we are told, and we will be sure to post them here when we get them.

Take a look at Laura Pieroni’s review here.  There is the blurb from the Tonopah Review, and Richard Menzies’ talk about the book and the man on KNPR, too.  And of course, check out what Richard himself saysabout the book.

In the meantime, Bunker’s piece is quite the review and I highly encourage everyone to read it.  In the meantime, take a moment to read this brief excerpt below:

What I liked about the “Short, Short Hitchhiker” was the honesty and pure humanity that filled the book. Without any business ambition, image to uphold, or salesmanship, Gurcze put pen to paper to tell simple stories that intersected the lives of the wealthy and the vagrant in our society.

In a country more and more fractured along the lines of wealth and money, where battle lines are being drawn between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, and where technological advancement may one day produce an article-writing computer that spits out superb True Grit columns in half the time and with none of the mental anguish, human stories about who we are (not what we own, what we make, or what we sell) are as relevant as ever.