P Moss divulges the real stories behind his short fiction collection Blue Vegas by TOD GOLDBERG
If there’s one question every author hates, it’s: Did that really happen? It’s a strange phenomenon, really, since it’s not as if people run up to Steven Spielberg to ask him how it was living with that adorable ET, as people can generally separate reality from fiction in just about all genres of entertainment except for fiction itself.
The temporal experience of reading lends itself to the belief that what you’re reading, what you’re experiencing on the page, must be true, or else why would you be feeling the emotions you’re having just on the basis of a typeface on a white page? The truth, of course, is that much fiction is rooted in at least some reality — authors do not exist in a vacuum — but reality may be a simple observation, a smell, a taste, a sentiment, memory or impression based on a fleeting moment of actual life.
Yet, in P Moss’s short story collection Blue Vegas, the first title from CityLife Books, it’s almost impossible not to see clear parallels between his fictional creations and the people who might sidle up to one of Moss’s two Las Vegas bars — the Double Down Saloon and Frankie’s Tiki Room — with a story to tell, a lie to sell, or a confession on their lips. But, of course, inspiration is a nebulous thing when it comes to telling an ostensibly “true” story — after all, truth and fact rarely are the same thing — so we’ve asked Moss to give us a little insight on a few of the stories that felt like the kind of apocryphal tales people tell late at night in bars they shouldn’t be in.
Read the full article here.
Posted by staceyfott
