Books about Las Vegas: readers' picks

UncategorizedNewsInfoBlog
Reading American citiesBooks

Winning in Las Vegas makes a good story, but losing sometimes makes an even better one. Here are our readers’ favourite books about Sin City

“Half-meritocracy and half crap-shoot, Las Vegas is [...] the only city in America where the odds against you are all posted in plain sight, literally and metaphorically,” wrote Maile Chapman last week. Do read her blogpost about the essential Vegas literature – from Fear and Loathing to recent fiction about the struggles of life in the city beyond the Strip – but are there ever enough books in a list? Our readers had plenty more to contribute, and here are their picks.

1. Super Casino: Inside the “New” Las Vegas by Pete Earley (2001)

Journalist and author Pete Earley wrote this book which mixes the history of the city’s gambling business and character sketches and vignettes of life. In the words of the author:

I wanted to discover what draws people there so I went “inside” the Luxor, a billion dollar, pyramid-shaped casino on the Strip. I tell the story through the eyes of the people who I met — a workaholic casino boss, a seasoned blackjack whiz, a showgirl — even a teenage hooker who dreams of someday becoming a casino dealer.

understruck recommended it: “It delves into the history and current mechanics.”

2. Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne (1974)

This long-out-of-print novel was the first from Dunne, aka Mr Joan Didion. According to a review in Kirkus: “In the middle of his thirty-seventh year and first nervous breakdown, reading obits of college pals in the alumni rag, the husband-author manque of Joan Didion rents an apartment in the town that’s always open. In between sleeping and TV quiz shows he gets to know some of the occasionally wealthy but always degenerate desperate citizens: comic Jackie Kasey, who gets $10,000 a week but drives himself crazy with lack of fame and status games like “taking steam” with Frankie or Sammy or Cosby; Artha the hooker who turned 1203 tricks with 1076 johns in five years, including 54 “multiples,” 24 S and 1 M; and Buster Mano, the private dick, who traces straying conventioneering hubbies and hustles gambling debts.” Sounds more than promising.

A “wonderful novel” according to ID5882060, despite its low sales and almost unknown status. This Esquire magazine piece dubbed it “the best Las Vegas book you’ve never read”.

3. The Stand by Stephen King (1978)

The master of horror’s The Stand – published first in 1978 and re-published in 1990 as an “uncut edition”, at 1,100 pages – is a giant post-apocalyptic novel that is considered one of his most important works by fans and critics. James Smythe wrote in the Guardian: “While I knew I loved King before that holiday [where he read it], afterwards I’d have followed him to hell and back. It’s because of The Stand that I’ve read all his work, and that I embarked on this series; it’s because of The Stand that I’m a writer at all.” “For me, the writing of Stephen King starts and ends with The Stand,” wrote author Richard Thomas on Buzzfeed.

“Nothing in The Stand is an accident. As much as it’s a novel about the battle between good and evil, it’s also a novel about fate. These people – the American contingent of the 0.6% of the world’s population who survived Captain Trips – manage to meet up in Las Vegas, called from all around by dreams. Did they choose to find each other, or was it chosen for them?” continued Smythe. The novel was recommended by reader CoronationChicken.

In quotes from the book:

Who gets to be bexst-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn’t bring yourself to do.

Dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who dream – or don’t dream in a way they can often remember when they wake up – are mentally constipated in some way.

4. Fools Die (1978) and Inside Las Vegas (1977) by Mario Puzo

The author of The Godfather wrote two books set in this city: the novel Fools Die, recommended by banjodsp, and the non-fiction Inside Las Vegas, a “world-weary account of the place” according to Face56. These are also examples of an author from elswehere (New York in this case, of course) settling in the city for a while and translating the experience into fiction and memoir. Apparently, Puzo himself was a “degenerate gambler” – but he believed Las Vegas was an honest, clean city.

In quotes from the book:

Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time. – Fools Die

The fact of the matter is that I wanted to hold a grudge in some funny kind of way. Against everybody. –Fools Die

It can be argued that man’s instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees. – Inside Las Vegas

With the perverse logic of a degenerate gambler he figured God was testing his faith. – Inside Las Vegas

5. In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance by David Thomson (1999)

Even though this history book covers the whole state, it “centres very much on the neon heart of the action,” said reader leroyhunter. Flm critic David Thomson’s study of the American West promises to be “part contemplation of an America both austere and flamboyant, part love letter to the Old West, part idiosyncratic travel guide” and to enlighten readers on why “Nevada is the place where Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Frank Sinatra became chairman of the board, divorce became an industry and gambling an institution...” Thomson also uses his huge knowledge of film and Hollywood to show how movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas, Casino and The Misfits “have shaped and played upon our preconceptions about Nevada and Las Vegas”, said a New York Times review.

In quotes from the book:

Nevada is on the edge, on the wire, off to one side, in the empty quarter, or even in the rest of the country’s head as an idea, a possibility, an alternative. It is an experiment, or a kind of theater ... for America has used Nevada as a testing ground, and not just for weapons and their destructiveness but also for new social ideas, and their explosiveness. What happens if you allow divorce, prostitution, gambling? Can there be community and purpose if you encourage things deep in human nature yet supposedly alien to order and togetherness?

6. About a Mountain by John D’Agata (2010)

This unique book is a lyric essay about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, an area for storage of spent nuclear fuel (from the entire United States) about 100 miles away from Las Vegas (in the plans of the government since the 80s). When D’Agata helped his mother move to Las Vegas in the summer 2002, the US Congress was going ahead with the plans, and the writer and essayist stayed to look into the history of it all (as well as investigate the mysterious suicide of a boy who jumped off a hotel-casino). The format of the book has also been called “a reporter’s notebook that reads like poetry” by NPR. D’Agata has “an encyclopedic understanding of the form’s intricate artistry”, according to the New York Times. It was “wholeheartedly recommended” by Ce_Santiago.

7. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)

Donna Tartt’s bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is partly set in Las Vegas (as well as in Amsterdam and New York City) – and the city’s presence in the story is very powerful, as our readers explained.

I thought the section of The Goldfinch set in Vegas was very strong, the sort of banality and frustration of trying to live a normal life in its suburbs rather than “blah blah Sin City”... – benzedrine

The portrayal of Las Vegas brought [the book] to a sort of life (as far as that word can be used) – the vast desert background, the huge sky and the semi-deserted housing estate, the boys pilfering from shops for food ... It came across as a parched, sterile, hating environment, rife with low-life. Boys growing up here, while parents gambled and stole, didn’t stand a chance of taking the right path. – JHawkinson

Definitely The Goldfinch – incredibly evocative of the sand blasted emptiness of the suburbs. – DeputyPeck

In quotes from the book:

Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth!

What mattered most, as I came to realize, was who’d lived in Vegas the longest, which was why the knock-down Mexican beauties and itinerant construction heirs sat alone at lunch while the bland, middling children of local realtors and car dealers were the cheerleaders and class presidents, the unchallenged elite of the school.


vegas Photograph: Guardian

8. Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brien (1990)

A scorching novel of alcohol, love, self-destruction and suicide, it was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film, starring Nicholas Cage. Reader DeputyPeck “thought it was heart-wrenchingly sad; no Las Vegas winners in that book.”

In quotes from the book:

Casinos … know that chips are a wonderful, pretty tool, and possess none of the stigma of dollars. Dollars translate too easily into hours or houses or cars or sex or food or everything, and so losing a dollar is a much more tangible experience than parting with a chip, an object that looks more like a midway consolation token than a medium of exchange.

American Tabloid (1995), the first book in the trilogy.

9. The Underworld USA Trilogy by James Ellroy

Las Vegas is “just up the road from Los Angeles” – in relative, American terms – as reader mydaray pointed out, so it was only inevitable for the quintessential LA crime writer to base some of his stories in Sin City. This trilogy, formed by the novels American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover, tells a saga of corruption in the late 50s and early 60s and includes real history – John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s assassinations and the Vietnam War among other defining events – and spans across the country. Las Vegas has a strong presence as the Mafia’s stronghold. It was also recommended by kelso77 and DJKM.

A very Ellroy-esque quote from The Cold Six Thousand

Pete pulled the blinds. Wayne hit the lights. There:

Sink water – dark pink – carving knives afloat. Baked beans and fruit flies on mold. Hair in a colander. Dots on the floor. Dots by the fridge.

Pete opened it. Pete smelled it. They saw it:

The severed legs. The diced hips. Mom’s head in the vegetable bin.

Extra notes

Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletterRead more

Reader ID6489058 offered a handy chronological reading list:

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e8GopqSrkqG8qHuRaWhuZ5qquXB8kWiZqKebqHqirs6uq2akkah6t7HGmqpmqpWWsaa%2B0manopubqA%3D%3D