Dear friends,

I am writing to let you know about an upcoming reading by H. Lee Barnes at Sundance Books and Music this Friday night.

I wrote about Lee last September for the High Country News in an article that attempted to capture’s his complexity and style.  Needless to say, I barely scratched the surface.  It probably also goes without saying that I believe that Lee is one of the best contemporary writers of Nevada and Western literature—a belief that is shared by many of his readers and fans.

We were proud to officially release Lee’s latest novel, Car Tag, through our publishing imprint, Virginia Avenue Press, earlier this week.  The press release associated with the book launch opened perfectly: “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.”  It goes on to describe the plight of the Debecki family, especially Drew, Billy, and their half brother Alex, as they grow up in a troubled home, find ways of coping, and eventually go their own way—finding distance, careers, and trouble to fill their adult lives.

The reviews so far have been simply tremendous.

• Susan Skorupa from the Reno Gazette-Journal writes that “there’s sadness and emotional uplift that the reader might not recognize until after closing the book. Tragedy makes room for renewal and hope for despair.”
• Brian Burghart from the Reno News and Review says that Barnes writes like “Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Burroughs.”
• Janet Walker at bookpleasures.com writes: “Only two American author’s books have moved me to tears; at age nine years, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and as an adult, reading Larry McMurtry’s, The Evening Star.  Now there’s a third – H. Lee Barnes, a good writer touched by greatness. Read his latest book, Car Tag; you’ll be glad you did.”
• The Midwest Book Review recommended it, calling it “a thoughtful novel of family and mystery.”
• Geoff Schumacher writes this: “Do the right thing: Buy this fine little book instead of the latest airport paperback and strike a blow for quality over marketing.”
• And the Las Vegas Review Journal ran a great profile of Lee and his book here.

The signing is going to bring Reno back to Reno, where he used to live and where some of this amazing book is set.  You can find more details about the reading here, but the basics follow:

What: A reading and signing with Nevada author H. Lee Barnes for his new book, Car Tag.

When: Friday, February 24, 2012 from 6:30 to 8:00PM

Where: Sundance Books and Music, 121 California Avenue, Reno, Nevada 89509

Thank you, and we hope to see you there.

Lee Barnes has been getting some pretty good coverage lately for his new book published by Virginia Avenue Press, Car Tag.  He was recently on an online radio station called Red Velvet Radio; we listed two new reviews here and three previous reviews here; and there is more coming, we’ve been told.

We’ve believed in this great book since we first read the manuscript.  Every time we read it, we found more beauty to its tragedy and more depth to its characters.  It is a Nevada story, through and through, and it is classic Barnes.  We were never worried that the reviewers would see it any other way to be honest, but you never know how the reviews will return.

And now, we have two new reviews that, in our opinion, are the best yet.  Well, to be more accurate, one is not a review as much as it is a profile of Lee and the book.  It’s a great piece, in which Lee tells his interviewer not to steal his dog’s chair, goes off on a colleague for teaching through movies, disregards postmodernism (totally appropriately), and embraces existentialism as a literary necessity.  Here is a little piece below:

Feeling alive versus feeling safe, he says, is also a theme through “Car Tag,” addressing Billy’s troubled past. “The closer you come to some kind of danger, especially as a kid, the more alive we feel, and the more safe and secure our lives are, in many ways the less we really live,” Barnes says.

Read the whole thing here.  It is completely worth your time.

And take a look at this excellent review by the great Geoff Schumacher (formerly of Tonopah and Las Vegas and now heading up a paper in Iowa) in Las Vegas City Life.  It’s an excellent review, through and through, and we appreciate this little endorsement at the end:

That Barnes manages to flow all these currents into a coherent and fast-paced 128 pages is a testament to his still-evolving talents. Do the right thing: Buy this fine little book instead of the latest airport paperback and strike a blow for quality over marketing.

Read all of it here.

And remember, he’s reading and signing his work at Sundance Books and Music in Reno this Friday evening.  Details below:

What: A reading and signing with Nevada author H. Lee Barnes for his new book, Car Tag.

When: Friday, February 24, 2012 from 6:30 to 8:00PM

Where: Sundance Books and Music,  121 California Avenue, Reno, Nevada 89509

What: A reading and signing with Nevada author H. Lee Barnes for his new book, Car Tag.

When: Friday, February 24, 2012 from 6:30 to 8:00PM

Where: Sundance Books and Music,  121 California Avenue, Reno, Nevada 89509

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

You should really take a look at the latest review of H. Lee Barnes’ novel Car Tag, the latest book to come out from Virginia Avenue Press, the publishing imprint of The Nevada Review.

It is from Janet Walker at www.bookpleasures.com.  The whole thing is here, but here is a taste.

Glimpses of the friendship and wild times the brothers share as they freewheel around the local neighborhood are funny and touching. While Drew and Alex make the transition from neglected abused children to responsible married men, Billy, accustomed to righting wrongs with his fists, doesn’t cut it. An ongoing disastrous love affair with a vulnerable flawed woman and a fight with Drew precipitate the tragic events which culminate in the death of a highway cop and Billy, at the scene and traumatized by the event, is arrested for murder.

Take a look at her concluding paragraph:

Only two American author’s books have moved me to tears; at age nine years, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and as an adult, reading Larry Mc Murtry’s, The Evening Star. Now there’s a third – H. Lee Barnes, a good writer touched by greatness. Read his latest book, Car Tag; you’ll be glad you did.

That’s a pretty heady endorsement of a book that we are incredibly proud of.  Read other recent reviews here.

Susan Skorupa and D. Brian Burghart, from the Reno Gazette-Journal and the Reno News and Review, respectively, have both penned reviews of our book, Car Tag, by H. Lee Barnes, recently. They are both great reviews.

Here is a bit from Susan’s:

“Car Tag,” a new novel by H. Lee Barnes, could have ended no other way than the way it does.

There’s sadness and emotional uplift that the reader might not recognize until after closing the book. Tragedy makes room for renewal and hope for despair.

Burghart’s is a great review too, check it out here:

And now, halfway through this “book review,” I’m going to make a discernible statement about Car Tag: If you like the types of writers and topics I’ve just described, you’re going to like this book. I’m not saying H. Lee Barnes is a member of that pantheon of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Burroughs types, I’m just saying he writes like them. Like if someone were reading novels written in 1940 before starting this, he or she wouldn’t be fundamentally sidetracked by intrinsic differences.

The great and wonderful Midwest Book Review also gave it a positive review:

One mistake may shatter a family. Car Tag is a dramatic novel following the fallout from the killing of a police officer by a young man. Over the next nine years, Drew Debecki crusades to try to save his brother from death row, going to various extent to do so. In his journey, he must remind himself of the memory of his brother in order to rescue him from his certain doom. Car Tag is a thoughtful novel of family and mystery, recommended.

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 »

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.