Nevada Reads 2018

This year, Nevada Reads will feature one novel, Julie Buntin’s Marlena: A Novel, and one nonfiction book, Sam Quinones’ Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. The opioid crisis impacts all Nevadans; rich and poor, young and old in every community in the state. More than 64,000 people died in the United States from opioid overdose last year, and according to statistics from the Center for Disease Control, Nevada ranked among the top 15 states for opioid overdose deaths.

Julie Buntin, Marlena: A Novel, Henry Holt and Co.

Everything about fifteen-year-old Cat’s new town in rural Michigan is lonely and offkilter, until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena’s orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts—first drink, first cigarette, first kiss—while Marlena’s habits harden and calcify. Within the year, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby. Now, decades later, when a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, Cat must try to forgive herself and move on, even as the memory of Marlena keeps her tangled in the past.

Buntin’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction writing at Marymount Manhattan College, and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Marlena is her first book.

Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, Bloomsbury

In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America—addiction like no other the country has ever faced. Acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two riveting tales of capitalism run amok whose unintentional collision has been a catastrophic opiate epidemic in Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.

Quinones is a journalist, storyteller, former Los Angeles Times reporter, and author of three acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction. His career as a journalist has spanned almost 30 years. He lived for 10 years as a freelance writer in Mexico, where he wrote his first two books. In 2004, he returned to the United States to work for the Los Angeles Times, covering immigration, drug trafficking, neighborhood stories, and gangs. In 2014, he resigned from the paper to return to freelancing, working for National Geographic, Pacific Standard Magazine, The New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and other publications. He is the 2008 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot prize for a career of excellence in covering Latin America. He is also a 1998 recipient of an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, one of the most prestigious fellowships given to print journalists.