Thank you so much for asking! We do have a few new books for your consideration.
Any covert (or overt) pot smokers on your list? Our new book Reefer Gladness: Stories, Essays, and Riffs on Marijuana is a provocative and intelligent examination of America's most politically potent plant. It's a somewhat daring combination of nonfiction and fiction, with essays on medical marijuana, pot in film, and alcohol and short stories featuring regular and irregular characters from every stratum of society who make marijuana a part of their lives. Giving this book as a gift is like providing a literary contact high. Written by Michael Konik (Man With the $100,000 Breasts and Telling Lies and Getting Paid) Reefer Gladness is now available at ShopLVA.com.
Speaking of short stories, our next title, My Week at the Blue Angel –- And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas, is a collection of creative non-fiction pieces penned by Matt O’Brien (Beneath the Neon –- Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas). In Blue Angel Matt reveals a side of Las Vegas most locals and visitors rarely see: a seedy weekly hotel on East Fremont Street, the challenges of a just-released ex-con, the heartache of parents searching for a daughter who disappeared from North Las Vegas, an inside look at Clark County’s wastewater treatment plant, the original two-part alternative-weekly series on the drainage system that became Beneath the Neon, and much more. This book will be available in early October.
Members of the Las Vegas Advisor got a sneak preview ofour next book, Eating Las Vegas –- The 50 Essential Restaurants, in the September newsletter. This is a unique dining guide, in that Las Vegas' best-known dining critics accomplished the impossible: They got together and came up with a list of the eateries that all three, who come from different generations, backgrounds, and food philosophies, could unanimously recommend. The reviews range from some of the Strip's most lavish establishments to hole-in-the-wall ethnic gems. The book contains a special "Vetoes" chapter that includes some of the restaurants prized by one critic and rejected by the others; it also recommends the best burgers, pizza, sushi, desserts, late-night and Old Vegas dining, and more. Eating Las Vegas will be available in mid-November.
Finally, hopefully in time for Christmas, we're bringing out a new Mafia book by our mob author Denny Griffin: Surviving the Mob –- A Street Soldier's Life Inside the Gambino Crime Family. This is the fascinating account of Andrew DiDonato, who grew up under the watchful eyes of local Mob wiseguys in Brooklyn and, at age 17, became an associate of the Nicholas Corozzo crew of the Gambino organization. For the next 14 years, he was a loyal street soldier whose crimes included burglary, forgery, extortion, loan sharking, car theft, bank robbery, counterfeiting, drug dealing, credit-card and insurance fraud, witness tampering, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. But in his early 30s, DiDonato ran afoul not only of the law, but also his friends, and he became a hunted man on both fronts. After 17 months on the lam, the law caught him first –- and he lived to tell this tale.
