Fall Culture Guide 2024: Literature and Ideas

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That’s Martin Luther King Jr. more than 60 years ago — something that some people believe our courts today need to be reminded of. Former trial lawyer Dayvid Figler guides author Stephen Bright through his thesis on the way our courts mete out justice, sometimes unjustly.

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There are laugh-out-loud moments in Dream City, especially if you’ve lived in Vegas long enough and heard the words he’s immortalized in print: “Las Vegas? You’re living there? Why would I want to go there?”

Unger is a UNLV professor and author of four novels, one of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest goes to the heart of the age-old Vegas struggle to maintain decency while scrabbling for dollars.

Have you met ‘the one’? Your true love? Love of your life? If you have, but then lost them, and fear you’ll never find that special connection again — you’ll want to hear André Aciman reading from two of his books: the unapologetically heartbreaking novel Call Me By Your Name and the brand new memoir My Roman Year.

Discuss: If the Romanovs hadn’t been toppled by the Bolshevik Revolution, would Russia be better off today? They were dethroned, of course, after ruling Russia for three centuries. Was it their own fault, or proof of that axiom: Absolute power corrupts absolutely? Had they fostered the class division — depicted poignantly in 1925’s Strike by Sergei Eisenstein — that led to their own downfall? Even if those questions aren’t answered, considering the current geopolitical landscape, this lecture and conversation promises to be worthwhile.

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry five years ago, Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost is described as a book-length single poem, which the author calls a “novel poem.” To unravel the tangle of his personal relationships, Gander sketches poetic images of the landscape as he walks the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward Barstow, California, where he was born.

After I looked up “solar eclipse” earlier this year, the algorithm began feeding me periodic social media alerts about comet near-misses, stars, and planets lately. It’s piqued my interest in the county museum’s events, including this one with Las Vegas Astronomical Society and Commissioner Jim Gibson, during which telescopes will be provided to attendees.

Most of us have been touched by suicide, because more people die from it in a Nevada year than homicides and vehicle deaths combined. Diana Khoi Nguyen’s brother took his own life, and her Ghost Of, from 2018, speaks to that desire all survivors have — that they could talk to the deceased again — while also processing the intergenerational trauma of those impacted by the Vietnam War.

Is it still every kid’s dream to unearth T. Rex fossils, discovering the dino-eat-dino world of 60-plus million years ago? Considered an expert on that beast and other theropods, Lindsay Zanno is one of the scientists who embodies that childhood dream come true. At this all-ages interactive presentation, she’ll reveal whether there was more to the T. Rex than big teeth and tiny arms.

Photographer, writer, Harvard professor of practice — Teju Cole is the kind of person you’d like to sit down with and just listen to. Born in Michigan, raised in Nigeria, he has a global perspective and, to his audiences, the kind of rational view they crave, but rarely hear, in America.

Raised in Nigeria, ’Pemi Aguda’s work explores a theme that’s prevalent among sociologists, geneticists, and anthropologists: Are we more than our inherited genes? Do we decide our life’s direction, or are we enslaved by DNA? The author will discuss these and other elements of her novel and short-story collection, Ghostroots.