Evening's Empire

"An incandescent masterpiece. . . . 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."—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

"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."—Frederick Barthelme, author of Doubledown

"Zachary Lazar has written a gripping book of unexpected beauty. In Evening's Empire, he remorselessly examines the ambiguous nature of both the shady deal and the good life. His analytic impulses soar with breathtaking imaginative leaps."—Christopher Sorrentino, author of Trance

"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."—Ian Frazier, author of Family

"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."—Laura Miller, Salon.com

"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."—Michael Miller, BookForum

"The style is gorgeous--understated, precise, atmospheric. Like a pointillist painter, Lazar gives us vivid dots that are all the more powerful because we have to do the work or connecting them."—Joan Wickersham, The Los Angeles Times

"Remarkable...a brave book, a project that promised to pay off its author in pain....via his effort [he] achieves a literary catharsis."—John Anderson, Newsday

"A brilliantly conceived, genre-bending story that features taut, exquisite prose."—Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker

"Evening's Empire is an artful exercise in reportorial chiaroscuro."—Amanda Heller, Boston Globe