That morning, I took my father’s watch from the top of the dresser where my mother kept it, stuffed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my jacket pocket and ran away.
She remembered dancing in the desert. She remembered stars. It was a dream, but one that felt vivid and made her giddy, her head bubbly. She’d been light as wind, a part of the nightscape whispering over the hills.
Vu Tran’s upcoming novel Dragonfish is set in the Vietnamese underworld of Las Vegas. Robert, an Oakland cop, can’t let go of Suzy, the mysterious Vietnamese wife who recently left him.
Nobody really expects a French place to have a good deal, right? Normally, people associate French food with expense, even though people in France don’t eat like that every day. What do you think so far?
He shows up clad in black, hefting a bag of his chapbooks, exuding a hint of recently smoked cigarette, effusively friendly, fidgety, fond of gestures. Yeah, Bruce Isaacson definitely comes off like a poet in the raw and expressive tradition of The Beats.
As a naturalized citizen of Fast Food Nation, my gustatory comfort zone is about the size of a burger and fries. Now and then I try to nudge those boundaries outward an inch or two, which is how I found myself at this winsome Asian-fusion place in Green Valley, ordering a short-rib flatbread. Which turns out to be more or less a pizza.
For a city with so many stories, characters, contrasts and conflicts — not to mention this whole ultralounge-on-Mars setting we’ve got going on — Vegas sometimes seems like a living novel.
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