Short stories and essays about how haywire 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 Veronica Lake on the eve of the Flamingo's opening), the present (a down-and-out journalist 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.