Experience the "Real Las Vegas" Through Writings About Reinvention


In a wide-ranging anthology that moves from the ancient artists of southern Nevada who carved petroglyphs into rock walls to contemporary family trauma, 10 Las Vegas essayists examine the weight of the past on the present-and, perhaps, the future. Set in and around a city with its own peculiar and complicated relationship to the very idea of history, these eclectic stories, essays, and poems examine the topic from a variety of surprising directions.


Go back in time to visit the basket-weaving tribes that predate the city's founding. Experience the heady midcentury days of freewheeling law enforcement. Follow an abuse survivor as she revisits the sites of family torment. Join a young African-American man as he experiences a racial epiphany in the county morgue. Listen in as a photographic model ponders the psychology of the men who hire her to recreate urgent moments from their pasts.


Through such stories, this collection-the 10th volume in the Las Vegas Writes series-presents a singular view of a city that's forever negotiating the uneasy passage between then and now.