Photos of the visually amazing Las Vegas, New Mexico (the original Las Vegas, founded in 1835). Besides having been the roughest town in the West, according to many historians (see www.HookIntoHistory.com), Las Vegas is one of the busiest TV and film locations in the Southwest, the locale for all or much of "Red Dawn," "Longmire," "No Country for Old Men," "Roswell, NM," "Easy Rider," and hundreds of other shows.
The Las Vegas we know was conceived -- if anybody really conceived it -- in 1931, when Nevada liberalised its divorce and gambling laws, which would ultimately transform the city into America's playground for grown-ups. It was also the year an unprecedented engineering project began, that would turn the Colorado River from a wild killer stream to a wild reservoir that waters not only California vegetables but also sprawling Las Vegas suburbs. From 1905 to 1931, Las Vegas was still a tiny oasis in a big, dangerous desert. Its isolated people made their own swamp coolers, their own entertainment and sometimes their own whiskey. The author, Joan Burkhardt Whitely, enlisted older Las Vegans to help capture the memories of a Mojave Mayberry where neighbours took care of each other, not merely because no one else would, but because it was their hometown, and they cared.
The bachelor party/guy's weekend has become a staple of the Las Vegas strip. The Las Vegas Little Black Book knows what men want from their weekend in Sin City, where to find it, how much to pay for it and how to go home satisfied.
In the 1930s the Cleveland Syndicate, a branch of organized crime, moved into the Cincinnati area. They took over businesses in Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati and began raking in money from illegal gambling and inviting top tier entertainment to perform in their clubs. Newport, Kentucky became the Vegas before Las Vegas took flight. By 1962, it had all come to an end with the election of an anti-vice sheriff. For the first time, visit the bars and clubs that made Northern Kentucky the original sin city. See where mobsters lived, visit the locations of buildings that no longer stand. Let your imagination run wild as you read about the events that occurred in these places.
The New York Times bestseller by the author of the forthcoming novel Alice & Oliver | Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters | A New York Times Notable Book “One word: bravo.”—The New York Times Book Review “Truly powerful . . . Beautiful Children dazzles its readers on almost every page. . . . [Charles Bock] knows how to tug at your heart, and he knows how to make you laugh out loud, often on the same page, sometimes in the same sentence.”—Newsweek One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son’s room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy’s father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy. As the Ewings navigate the mystery of what’s become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell’s vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people of Beautiful Children are “urban nomads,” each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance. In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemption heralding the arrival of a major new writer. Praise for Beautiful Children “Exceptional . . . This novel deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter.”—The Washington Post Book World “Magnificent . . . a hugely ambitious novel that succeeds . . . Beautiful Children manages to feel completely of its moment while remaining unaffected by literary trends. . . . Charles Bock is the real thing.”—The New Republic “A wildly satisfying and disturbing literary journey, led by an author of blazing talent.”—The Dallas Morning News “Wholly original—dirty, fast, and hypnotic. The sentences flicker and skip and whirl.”—Esquire “An anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity . . . The language has a rhythm wholly its own—at moments it is stunning, near genius.”—A. M. Homes “From start to finish, Bock never stops tantalizing the reader.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Rich and compelling . . . captures the hallucinogenic setting like a fever dream.”—Los Angeles Times
A lavish coffee-table-format tribute to the attractions of Sin City is organized geographically to cover its downtown, north strip, south strip, and "off the strip" areas, in a full-color photographic tour that is complemented by historical information. Simultaneous.
The Vegas Dilemma, a collection of twenty-seven short stories, weaves a vision of contemporary America through the eyes of its outcasts. Set largely in Las Vegas, featuring a recurring character of a footloose, morose woman who likes to eat Cheerios in grocery stores, each story takes up quotidian concerns-staying in Starbucks past closing time, a visit to Hoover Dam, falling in love over Instagram-and mines them for their political and existential undercurrents, which fly off the stories like sparks from a pinwheel. A cycle of stories-"Pulverized Oat Wheels," "Mother Nature is Belligerent", "Symmetry of Provocation", etc.-make use of a vignette style to suture seemingly disparate scenarios and emotions. Thus, in "Not Capable of Giving her Leprosy" we meet a sexually exploitative American professor at a South Korean University; a reading group who meet in Starbucks to discuss the ethics of eating meat while reading The Vegetarian; palm trees that are mistaken for armadillos; and Walmart identified as a nerve agent. Other stories, such as "Your Sadness is Salt on Salt" and "In My Youth My Father Is Short and Poor," use a sparse first-person voice for more poetic effect. Connected by themes of alienation, bad romance, and microaggressions, The Vegas Dilemma combines the inventiveness of fiction and the richness of everyday life to show that such American tragedies as Trump's ascendency and the Weinstein scandal aren't divorced from everyday interactions, but arise from them.
It's party time in Las Vegas when four former college roommates and best friends converge on Sin City. Add in a crazy drunken bet about finding "the one that got away" to see if there's a spark still burning after all these years—how bad could it be? Diana Sanford loves her friends and isn't above pulling a few strings to help them find their long lost loves. She didn't have a past love from college, so her best friends agreed her bet should be modified—for her to win, she had to have a wild passionate one-night stand with a stranger. Kirk Jamison was fascinated with the curvy redhead who landed in his arms after nearly falling. When she offered to spend the night with him, he couldn't refuse. Things heated up, until he got called back on a case, and he's forced to leave before they make love, with a promise to keep in touch. Little does he know, Diana had no intention of ever seeing him again. Desire's flame burned hot between the two once. Can the flames of desire be rekindled into a raging inferno or will misunderstandings tear them apart? Only a return trip to Vegas holds the answer to their happily-ever-after.
Over forty million people a year travel to Vegas, more than to Mecca. It is a global celebrity, an improbable oasis, a place offering bank-breaking fortunes and instant gratification, 24/7, with no moral debits. Award-winning writer Timothy O’Grady lived in Vegas for two years. He finally began to understand it when he talked to people who had grown up there, the children of the card dealers and cocktail shakers, the jugglers and the dancers – young people who had been bearing witness to this strange city all their lives. One had her student loans and credit card limits stolen by her father. Another fled a sequence of exploiters until she found herself living in the storm drains under the casinos. There is the boy whose father entered him into a drinking contest when he was eight, the casino owner’s son, the erudite contortionist turned stripper. Each tells their own tale. In Children of Las Vegas, O’Grady renews his partnership with renowned photographer Steve Pyke. Through short essays, Pyke’s portraits and ten witness testimonies, he pierces the city’s glittering façade to reveal the darker reality that lies beneath.
