The best book about Sin City ever written. Yes, better even than Hunter S. Thompsons Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . . . Dunne has Thompson beat. His grotesqueries aren't drug-induced, they're very real. His is the genuine Vegas . . . What happened to John Gregory Dunne in Vegas didn't stay in Vegas, and he was all the better for it. So will you be after reading this phenomenal book.
Sean Manning, Esquire
Dunne set himself up in a tickytacky Vegas apartment and began to roam the Strip, in search not so much of adventure as of the company that misery loves . . . Their stories are funny, poignant and fascinating, and Dunne tells them with sympathy but without sentiment . . . A fine, wry, perceptive, graceful book that does as much for the dark side of the American funhouse as Hunter Thompsons Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas did for the manic side. Jonathan Yardley, The New York Times Book Review
Dunne knows the terrain so well and describes it in such precise, measured, understated style that he makes his hell a thing of beauty . . . It is as though Dunne had set out to find an environment that was the perfect objective correlative for the misery he was carrying around inside him. And whether or not he set out to find it, Las Vegas was there waiting for him, waiting for a writer of his talent and perception to come along and tell us what it is really like. Bruce Cook, The New Republic
Dunnes account of a season spent on the Vegas Strip is a dark journey into the soul of American capitalism and it makes for just as harrowing a read fifty years after the fact. Its deeply personal and utterly unsettling. Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2025
This classic, first published in 1974, is not so much a memoir as it is a fictional retelling of what John Gregory Dunne actually did do: separate from his wife, Joan Didion, and three-year-old daughter in Los Angeles and move to Las Vegas . . . He ended up with enough material to create a fevered dream of a memoir . . . McNally Editions does its usual first-class job in its reissue of Vegas, complete with an excellent foreword by Stephanie Danler. Jim Kelly, Air Mail
A brilliant . . . wild, sardonic and funny anatomy a Fun City . . . a porno movie between covers . . . It is sexually explicit, the dialogue is rough, but recorded with the highest fidelity . . . The reader will not be able to put the book down. San Francisco Chronicle
John Gregory Dunnes rollicking paean to Sin City, first published in 1974 and long out of print, inevitably reads as a kind of rejoinder to Play It As It Lays, published by Joan Didion, his wife, four years earlier. Both novels feature protagonists in the throes of nervous breakdowns. Both are set amid unmoored Western sprawl. Both concern a characters divorcein Dunnes case, a darkly comic attempt to stave off divorce; in Didions, finalized. How much of each book spoke to the couples actual marriage? Part of the joy in revisiting Dunnes picaresque is the speculation. Randy Kennedy, Hauser and Wirth Ursula Magazine
In this hilarious and sometimes frightening maverick of a book, some Vegas denizensa hooker, a dealer, a second-string comicand John Gregory Dunnewillingly enter the confession box. The result is a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, limned by a brilliant reporter. Brian Moore
Powerful, disturbing, entertaining and significant. Los Angeles Times
