Las Vegas Writes

When the lake runs dry, we’ll know the value of water.

Monsoon Season: Las Vegas Writers on Water in the Desert, the 16th volume in the acclaimed Las Vegas Writes series, gathers a powerful chorus of voices exploring the desert city’s resilience and hidden beauty. Legendary Nevada writers John L. Smith, Geoff Schumacher, and Scott Dickensheets deliver moving essays on loss—of innocence, water, love—reminding us why they remain pillars of the region’s literary landscape. Rising talents Marlene Roque, JM Huck, and Erika Dagri bring fresh perspectives, writing with generosity and tenderness about Hispanic machismo, Southwestern art, and the rare magic of desert rain. Iconic Nevada author and historian Sally Denton provides a lovely overview of Las Vegas that reminds us of our city’s hold on the popular imagination. UNLV professor Andrew S. Nicholson, meanwhile, closes the collection with a luminous prose poem. Early nature writer Mary Austin’s essay “The Land of Little Rain” is reprinted here, too. Finally, local comics artist Safiyya Bintali provides the cover illustration.

With the support of Huntington Press and Nevada Humanities, Monsoon Season affirms the vitality of the Las Vegas literary scene in these arid and parched times. These essays testify to a city that, like Southern Nevada itself, endures and astonishes when the rains finally arrive.

Contributing Writers: Erika Dagri, Sally Denton, Scott Dickensheets, JM Huck, Andrew S. Nicholson, Marlene Roque, Geoff Schumacher, and John L. Smith. Cover art by Safiyya Bintali. Editor, Jarret Keene. 

Flora flourishes in the desert, fauna in the neon jungle.

In the Mojave Desert surrounding Las Vegas are hundreds of species of wildflowers. Every few years, copious rainfall results in an explosion of color. Without rain, flowers bide their time, waiting for the moment to burst out in bloom. It’s the perfect metaphor for creative souls residing in an extreme environment like Southern Nevada. What does it mean to be an artist in a town founded on conspicuous displays of wealth and glaring showcases of inequality? How do we adapt to an unforgiving landscape that baits the hook with free booze and buffets? 

Desert Superbloom: Las Vegas Writers on Scarcity and Abundance, Las Vegas Writes, Volume 15, includes a collection of original essays, stories, and graphic narratives that portray Las Vegas—a city founded on flaunting so much, while cherishing so little. With unique perspectives on blossoming in the luxurious yet resource-starved Sin City, this 15th volume of the annual Las Vegas Writes series features 15 local writers and artists, portraying a place where money is king, water is scant, and affordable housing is even harder to find than love. Join them as they portray Las Vegas—a city founded on flaunting so much, while cherishing so little. 

Contributing Writers: Jennifer Battisti, Christian Bertolaccini, Safiyya Bintali, Nicole Damon, Melissa Gill, Ana Jimenez, Victoria Koelkebeck, Mark Lenker, Paul W. Papa, Shannon Salter, S.G. Tasz, Cynthia Vespia, Autumn Widdoes, and Staci Layne Wilson. Editor, Jarret Keene. 

In Las Vegas, the eyes do all the work. From the Fountains of Bellagio to the petroglyphs of Red Rock Canyon to Hoover Dam’s epic concrete curvature, our optic nerves are always busy, always relaying images to our brains, images of a town that never rests, that never stop giving us something to gaze at. But what is it like to witness Las Vegas as an insider, as someone who can always check out and yet never leave? A collection of original essays and comics, Feather Shows: Las Vegas Writers on Movies, TV, and Other Spectacles presents readers with new appraisals of a city with a mythic reputation for dazzling fun and arousing frivolity. 

Featured authors: Angela M. Brommel, Sarah Calvo, Sean Clark, Delight Chinenye Ejiaka, Nancy Wright Hardy, Nanette Rasband Hilton, Jarret Keene, Jenessa Kenway, Heather Lang-Cassera, Shwa Laytart, Jean Munson, Tiffany Pereira, Vera Petrychenka, and Mike Weatherford. Jarret Keene, Editor.

In a city founded as much upon music as anything else, a question endures: How does this history as the entertainment capital of the West influence the non-stop momentum of today’s Las Vegas? Neon Riffs and Lounge Acts: Las Vegas Writers on Music is an anthology that considers the enduring momentum of Las Vegas on music, live, and recorded. This is a place where great music was made famous by the King of Pop, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Rat Pack. Twelve of the best writers in the valley—a few musicians themselves—pursue the rattle and hum of Sin City musicality, exploring what drives hard rock and soft ballads in the desert. Prepare yourself for the emotional reality of living for the music in the heart of this throbbing mass-entertainment venture.

The book includes original, never-before-published essays by: Jason Bracelin, Betty Burston, Alycia Calvert, Sara Dudo, Brian Garth, John Glionna, Wendy Randall, Timea Sipos, Benjamin Stallings, Kelly Stith, Carlos Tkacz, and Tyler Williams.

The 2021 Las Vegas Writes anthology, Love in the Dunes: Las Vegas Writers on Passion and Heartache, takes aim at a burning question: Is love possible in Sin City? Sponsored by Nevada Humanities and published by Huntington Press, Las Vegas Writes is an annual collection of writings by local authors focused on a theme connected to Las Vegas. The theme of the twelfth volume in the series is simple and sensual, and the questions it poses are vast: How does one fall in love in an environment of beige suburbs and glitzy hotel-casinos, and how much do we surrender of ourselves in order to possess the object of our desire? Meet 13 of the hottest authors in the valley as they share their deepest, most tantalizing stories of Las Vegas romance and breakup, narratives that express what it feels like to have your heart kissed by neon and flesh. Indeed, this is a literary evening devoted to navigating the boundaries of puppy love and obsession, flings and affairs, hanky-panky and playing around, intimacy and intrigue, relationships and rendezvous.

Contributing authors: Emily Bordelove, Melissa Bowles-Terry, Bob Dancer, Kim Idol, Heather Lang-Cassera, Nicole Minton, Jen Nails, Mauricio Ortiz Zaragoza, Krystal Ramirez, Brett Riley, Nicholas Russell, and Tonya Todd with an introduction by the editor of Las Vegas Writes, Jarret Keene.

How does Las Vegas morality differ from morality in other cities? Has living in the valley caused you to redraw the line between good and evil? If the Mob was evil, how can Las Vegas count itself among the best places to live when death was the Mob’s order of business? You might explore what compromises you’ve made to survive. Surrounded by dispensaries and slot machines, you might confess that Las Vegas has blunted your sense of right and wrong, numbed your righteousness. You might reach a realization that your earlier moral lines were naively, lazily drawn. Perhaps you’ll succumb to the notion that Las Vegas is where good people go to decay, to submit to vice. Or where bad people arrive, hoping for a second chance.

Featured Authors: Keith Brantley, Brittany Bronson, Tim Chizmar, Laura Decker, Krista Diamond, Fawn Douglas, Eric Duran-Valle, Samantha Goodman, Don Hall, Dana Jerman, Glenn Puitt, Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña, and Beth Rosenberg. Edited by Jarret Keene. Cover Design: Christopher Smith. Cover Art: Aaron Mayes.

Nevada Humanities announces A Change Is Gonna Come: Reinvention in the City of Second Changes, Volume 10 of the ongoing Las Vegas Writes series, published by Huntington Press. Every year Nevada Humanities and the Las Vegas Writes project commission a series of writers to develop an original work surrounding a theme connected to Las Vegas. For the past nine years, topics have focused on Las Vegas' history, future, and literature, highlighting the broad scope of the literary talents of those who live and work in Nevada. A Change Is Gonna Come showcases 14 Las Vegas-based writers who explore the theme of reinvention. Through essays, short stories, and poems, the authors explore the various manifestations of reinvention in the context of Las Vegas, long regarded as a city of second chances. Co-editor Scott Dickensheets notes, "Most reinvention is neither sinister nor worthy of note; it's just everyday personal growth, as we work to extend or escape our narratives and histories."

Features writers: Jennifer Battisti, Steve Bornfeld, Harry Fagel, Lonn M. Friend, A.D. Hopkins, Dayvid Figler, Veronica Klash, Oksana Marafioti, Mike Prevatt, Vogue Robinson, Erin Ryan, Steve Sebelius, Amanda Skenandore, and Elizabeth Quiñones- Zaldaña. Cover Design: Christopher Smith. Publisher: Anthony Curtis, Huntington Press.

The Las Vegas Writes Project 2019 is supported by public and private funding for the literary arts through Nevada Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Nevada Center for the Book, Nevada State Library Archives and Public Records, Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Nevada Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, Las Vegas-Clark County Library District Foundation, Test Site Projects, and Huntington Press. The program receives support with readings and conversations hosted at venues that support the literary arts from, the city of Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs, The Writer's Block Book Store, and the Las Vegas Book Festival at the Historic 5th Street School, and the Clark County Library, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Short stories and essays about how haywire Las Vegas can get!

Las Vegas was built on billions of intimate unnatural disasters―bad turns of the cards, unfortunate rolls of the dice. In both fiction and essays, this wide-ranging anthology extends the dynamic of unnatural disasters beyond the gaming parlors and into the streets, homes, and other eccentric spaces of Las Vegas.

Among the nonfiction, you’ll descend into a decades-old atomic bunker, given new relevance as international relations tense; meet a man tinkering with his own brain chemicals in hopes of improving his chess game; follow a foster mother as she negotiates the fraught relations with the drug-addicted biological mother of the children in her care; gauge the meaning of post-shooting #VegasStrong through the lens of the popular video game Fallout: New Vegas.

The fiction is equally eclectic, taking in the Las Vegas of the past (Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill on the eve of the Flamingo’s opening), the present (a down-and-out barfly drifts into danger as he investigates what appeared to be an accidental disaster), and the future (an Oceans’ 11-style sci-fi romp). Together, these writings show some of the many ways that life in Las Vegas is shaped by things going haywire―and, sometimes, by how we overcome disaster. Featured writers: Megan Edwards, Kim Foster, John Hay, Jarret Keene, Andrew Kiraly, C. Moon Reed, Lissa Townsend Rodgers, Jason Scavone, David G. Schwartz, F. Andrew Taylor, and Kristy Totten. Edited by Scott Dickensheets and Geoff Schumacher. Cover Design: Christopher Smith, Cover Image: Robert Beckmann. Publisher: Huntington Press.

Las Vegas Writes Project is supported by public funding for the literary arts through the Las Vegas Book Festival, Nevada Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, the city of Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs, and Huntington Press.

In a sweeping anthology that moves from the ancient makers of Southern Nevada’s petroglyphs and occupants of the county morgue to denizens of contemporary street life, ten Las Vegas essayists examine the many ways our pasts shape our present— and, possibly, our future.

Set in and around a city with its own complex relationship to history, these eclectic narratives take you in surprising directions. Listen in as a photography model ponders the psychology of the men who hire her to recreate red-letter moments from their pasts. Follow the rollicking account of a young historian’s baptism in early-’80s journalism. Watch as a writer bottoms out and gets back up.

By indelibly joining the timeless—family, race, trauma, love, death—with the personal, the essays in this collection, the eighth volume in the Las Vegas Writes series, present a singular view of a city that’s forever negotiating the turbulent passage between then and now.

Featured writers: Lee Barnes, Dawn-Michelle Baude, Noah Cicero, Nicholas Russell, Michael Green, Heather Lang, Daniel Hernandez, Stacy J. Willis, T.R. Witcher, and Sarah Jane Woodall. Edited by Scott Dickensheets and Geoff Schumacher. Cover Image: Heather Protz Publisher: Huntington Press.

The Las Vegas Writes Project is supported by public funding for the literary arts through the Las Vegas Book Festival, Nevada Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, the city of Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs, Huntington Press, and in part from a grant from the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts a federal agency.

What if gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson took one more journey to Las Vegas in search of the American Dream? What if the ghost of Ted Binion haunted his former home? What if Andre Agassi were caught up in a futuristic courtroom drama? These questions and more are explored by writers tackling the challenge of creating a fictional story around a Las Vegas icon. From a historical saga of Las Vegas’ early days to a madcap clone war along a sci-fi strip, eight local writers experiment with a range of styles and genres in this seventh volume of the Vegas Valley Book Festival’s Las Vegas Writes Project.

Contributors to this edition: Scott Dickensheets, C.J. Mosher, Drew Cohen, Jessie Humphries, Helen H. Moore, Sonya Padgett, Erica Vital-Lazare, and Doug Elfman. Edited by Geoff Schumacher. Cover Design: Herman Valencia. Publisher: Huntington Press.

You never know what you’ll encounter in a lost-and-found – random items, lost histories, and left-behind fragments of very different lives. Something thrilling perhaps, or something banal, something mysterious, maybe even something that defies belief. The same is true of Las Vegas, a city that attracts a staggering variety of people, stories, and schemes, and draws it unique energies form the interaction of so many random elements. Nowhere else is it so easy to get lost and so vital to be found. That makes “lost and found” the perfect theme for the 10 writers in the anthology to explore a city that conceals so much and reveals even more.

This is the sixth volume in the Las Vegas Writes Project series, an annual collection designed to showcase the city’s literary talent. This issues writers are: David Armstrong, Mason Ian Bundschuh, Heidi Kyser, Joseph Langdon, Launce Rake, Moniro Ravanipour, Geoff Schumacher, T.R. Witcher, and Mercedes M. Yardley. Edited by Scott Dickensheets. Cover Design: Mary Hill. Publisher: Huntington Press.

Progress is a motive force in every city—and, perhaps, the point of civilization itself. The evolution of Sin City has challenged conventional meanings and methods of forward movement since it began its modernization by embracing both nontraditional behaviors (legalized gambling, liberalized divorce laws) and sizable federal investments (Hoover Dam, Nellis Air Force Base). Through the up and down eras that followed—Rat Pack, Elvis, megaresorts, housing boom, housing bust, and now the Downtown Project—Las Vegas has always coined its own definition of progress. In these stories and essays by some of Las Vegas’ finest writers, you will see how locals weave spectacle, risk, and reward into the narratives of civic, political, financial, personal, and spiritual progress ... or, sometimes, calamity.

Featured writers: Aurora Brackett, Henry Brean, Geoff Carter, Abigail Goldman, John Katsilometes, Rena Mason, Kris Saknussemm, Doug Unger, Sarah Jane Woodall, Scott Dickensheets, Editor. Cover Design: Mary Hill, Publisher: Huntington Press.

The postcard is a brilliant piece of pop culture. These simple, lightweight rectangles of good cheer serve many functions at once: They are glimpses of a special place, vessels of memory, fragments of story -- and, for those that survive, little capsules of history. That's especially true of postcards from Las Vegas, one of the most visually dynamic, changing, meaning-packed locales in the world.

Inspired by iconic Sin City postcards, eight of the city's best writers delve deep into their imaginations to conceive short stories and essays that cast a fresh eye on a place you only think you know.

Featured writers: Quentin R. Bufogle, Maile Chapman, Maxwell Alexander Drake, Lindsey Leavitt, Corey Levitan, Greg Blake Miller, Kristen Peterson and Lissa Townsend Rodgers. Editor: Scott Dickensheets. Publisher: CityLife Books, an imprint of Stephens Press.

Decay is unavoidable. It's everywhere around us, physically, socially, spiritually. In our crumbling inner cities and foreclosure-ravaged suburbs. In the widening chasms of our politics. In the erosion of the social contract that once governed how we treat each other. In our own aging bodies and diminishing ambitions. Decay is a powerfully meaningful subject in the context of Las Vegas, a city devoted to gleaming surfaces, the glamour of youth and the thrill of the new. But it isn't immune to decline, and in the ten essays collected here, a diverse group of the city's best writers - novelists, journalists, scholars, critics - confront it head on. With refreshing candor, penetrating insight and plenty of wit, they probe the rot and look for ways to reclaim it, whether it's in their community, our public life or within themselves.

The writers who participated in this project, sponsored by the 2011 Vegas Valley Book Festival, are Stephen Bates, Deborah Coonts, Lynette Curtis, Jarret Keene, Danielle Kelly, Andrew Kiraly, Rick Lax, Matthew O'Brien, Steve Sebelius and Stacy J. Willis. Cover Design: Mary Hill. Publisher: CityLife Books, an imprint of Stephens Press.

The Perpetual Engine of Hope, a collection of short stories inspired by vintage Las Vegas photographs, takes you on an epic journey from the heyday of the mob era to a dystopian future of dashed dreams. No matter the genre, from crime noir to horror, psychological drama to urban fantasy, these stories have something compelling to say about Las Vegas and its ability to inspire hope even amid the most dire circumstances. Along the way, the writers revel in the city's rich past and ponder its uncertain future, the historic images driving them to consider Las Vegas from fresh and illuminating perspectives.

Featured writers: K. W. Jeter, Dayvid Figler, Juan Martinez, Oksana Marafioti, Alissa Nutting, Megan Edwards, Geoff Schumacher, Editor. Publisher: CityLife Books, an imprint of Stephens Press.

In Restless City, a serial novel written by seven different Las Vegas authors, private eye Daniel Brady takes a routine job for a high-rolling gambler that turns into a dangerous journey into the dark recesses of Sin City. This fast-paced mystery, which pays homage to crime noir pioneers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, propels readers from the seedy streets of downtown Las Vegas to the posh suites of the Strip. Along the way, Brady must untangle a web of intrigue, distinguishing fantasy from reality in a city that thrives on illusions. Each writer pushes Brady deeper into a conspiracy in which he encounters a rich cast of characters, reflecting the diverse palette of Las Vegas.

The authors who participated in this project, sponsored by the 2009 Vegas Valley Book Festival, represent a who's who of the Las Vegas literary scene. They are H. Lee Barnes, John H. Irsfeld, Brian Rouff, Leah Bailly, John L. Smith, Constance Ford, and Vu Tran, with Geoff Schumacher serving as editor. Restless City is the first title published by CityLife Books, an imprint of Stephens Press.