Live Through This ― An Anthology of Unnatural Disasters: Stories and Essays by Las Vegas Writers

Short stories and essays about how haywire Vegas can get!

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.

As the senior director of content for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, Geoff Schumacher creates exhibits, acquires artifacts, develops educational programs, and serves as a historical resource for media outlets. Before joining the museum in 2014, Schumacher was a journalist for 25 years. He was a reporter and city editor for the Las Vegas Sun, editor of Las Vegas CityLife and the Las Vegas Mercury, and director of community publications and a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He culminated his newspaper career as publisher of the Ames (Iowa) Tribune. He is the author of Sun, Sin & Suburbia: The History of Modern Las Vegas and Howard Hughes: Power, Paranoia & Palace Intrigue. He edited Nevada: 150 Years in the Silver State and three editions of the Las Vegas Writes book series.

Scott Dickensheets is the deputy editor of Desert Companion, the magazine of Nevada Public Radio. Before that, he edited Las Vegas CityLife and the Las Vegas Weekly, served as managing editor of Las Vegas Life, and worked in a number of positions at the Las Vegas Sun, from assistant features editor to columnist. Prior to that, he worked as a publicist and magazine editor for the Allied Arts Council. Dickensheets has edited or co-edited five previous volumes of the Las Vegas Writes series and was an assistant editor on Nevada: 150 Years in the Silver State.