It all comes back to the West. In his new collection, Rosamond Lehmann in Vegas, author Nick Hornby compiled his best Believer columns from the magazine’s time in Sin City. The collection, which features a foreword by Alta Journal contributor Claire Dederer, is packed with funny insights and literary wit. Hornby sits down with Alta’s editorial director, Blaise Zerega, to tell tales, share stories, and expound on the world as only he can.

About the author:

Nick Hornby is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and award-winning author. He has written eight novels including Just Like You, Funny Girl, Juliet Naked, A Long Way Down, Slam, How to Be Good, About a Boy, and High Fidelity. His nonfiction books include Dickens & Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius, 31 Songs, Fever Pitch, and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his columns in the Believer magazine, for which he continues to write.

Hornby received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay he adapted from Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn. He adapted Cheryl Strayed’s memoir for Wild and was Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated for his screenplay adaptation of Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education. He adapted Nina Stibbe’s memoir, Love, Nina, for the BBC television series, and both seasons of his TV series State of the Union won Emmys.

Hornby received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he cofounded the children’s writing charity Ministry of Stories in East London.

About the book:

In Rosamond Lehmann in Vegas, a new anthology of his columns for the Believer, Nick Hornby delves into the latest escapades from his reading life. Spanning the magazine’s Las Vegas era, these consistently hilarious dispatches touch on numerous subjects, including epic cattle drives, chess prodigies, and Arsenal’s 1976 thrashing of West Ham. From his tub-side lectern, Hornby catalogs everything he reads—the good, the great, and the could-not-finish—with the characteristic wit and charm that has made his column so widely beloved. Whether writing about heartbreak or quantum physics, Hornby offers surprising insights and proves himself, once again, as one of our greatest living cultural critics.

Here are some notable quotes from today’s event:

  • On the Believer: “I was kind of blown away by the creative energy that goes on there. Everything they do: the intuition, the writing, the art. They’d just printed the first edition of the magazine of the Believer, and I was being shown that, and I thought, Oh, I’d love to write for that.”
  • On the book’s title: “Rosamond Lehmann was a great English novelist of the ’30s, ’40s—a kind of Bloomsbury-ish author. Brilliant, underrated. And I read a bunch of her books soon after the Believer had gone to Vegas. It was one of those reading journeys where I’d never read her before, and there were various reasons why I ended up reading her. It seemed to be very much in the spirit of how I started the column—one thing leading to another. And she’s not someone who would have ever been near Vegas in a billion years.”
  • On deciding which books to buy and which to read: “I think if you listen to your body, your body tells you what you need—in the same way that you know whether to drink more water or to stop eating junk food for a few days. Our relationship with books is like that. Sometimes we’re in a good enough place where we can read something deep and serious, and sometimes the world is distracting you, and you want something that’s not like that at all.”
  • On becoming a critic: “The first story I sold didn’t appear anywhere. And they asked, ‘Would you do a review instead?’ And I thought, OK. I had some fun with it, and they asked me to do another one, and then it went from there.”

Check out these links to some of the topics brought up this week.