Description

About the Author

Zachary Lazar graduated from Brown University and received the Iowa Writer's Workshop's James Michener/Copernicus Society Award. Evening's Empire is his third book. He lives in Southampton, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey, where he holds a 2009-2010 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. He received a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Praise for Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder…

"Although Evening's Empire is categorized as both memoir and true crime, much of the book reads as a novel. . . .The multiplication of Warren's intrigues and a cumulative sense of doom supply its narrative drive."
-Salon.com

"Zachary Lazar has managed an amazing feat--to evoke both Joan Didion's fierce intelligence and Truman Capote's eerie ability to enter into the unknown. And then there's the deep river of heartbreak flowing beneath it all. Evening's Empire is an incandescent masterpiece."

"Evening's Empire is a fascinating take on a time and a place, built from the inside out by a conspicuously interested party, as entertaining and evocative as could be, like a Scorsese movie, only richer, more thrilling for the memoir-like underpinnings. The story of Zachary Lazar's father is tricky and slippery, as mysterious as all those lights in the sky Arizona is so famous for, but much more human and down to earth. You'll want to put this one in the can't-put-it-down pile."

"Evening's Empire is a remarkable work of non-fiction in which reporting and imaginative empathy combine. Lazar's story of the murder of his father is spooky, sharply-focused, loving, beautiful, and richly redolent of a recent America now vanished into the past."

"Using interviews, research and his ample storytelling gifts, Lazar guides us through the career of his father.... Like Sway, the book has a heightened sense for the subtleties of influence and charisma, particularly Warren's....Lazar can deliver scenes of criminal behavior that's at once deeply disturbing and morbidly comic....[Evening's Empire] reveals a writer with emotional heft, tight prose, and searing insights into the complexities of a criminal world that must have looked pretty harmless-until it suddenly wasn't."
-BookForum

"An indelible portrait of the Space Age suburbs and an American dream built on fraud."
-"The Daily Details," Details.com

"Evening's Empire was named a fall "must-read" by GQ, Newsday, and Time Out New York."
-"This Week's Hot Reads," The Daily Beast

"A brave book, a project that promised to pay off its author in pain. What was Lazar going to discover about his dead father? He may not have had memories, but he must have erected a memorial in his mind for the father he lost so young....He achieves literary catharsis."
-Newsday

"[Lazar's] style is gorgeous--understated, precise, atmospheric...It's a spotty, murky, haunting story, told by a son who understands it better than his father ever could have."
-The Los Angeles Times

"Evening's Empire is a brilliantly conceived, genre-bending story that features taut, exquisite prose about the murder of Zachary Lazar's father, via modes of the memoir, the novel, and investigative journalism."

"Evening's Empire, which may be as close to watching a Scorsese film as one can get on the page, is infused with heat and action, jumpy snitches and crooked politicians and Chicago mobsters... And yet Zachary Lazar also keeps it cool, playing the narrative much as Joan Didion does, the emotional withholding and near invisible release, as much happening between the lines as on them."
-OregonLive.com