A savage journey into the heart of Hunter S. Thompson's Las Vegas with the Good Doctor as tour guide. A Lord-of-the-Rings-like adventure in the city's underground flood channels. A seven-day stay at a seedy motel on East Fremont Street. The stories in My Week at the Blue Angel aren't about Steve Wynn, Cirque du Soleil, or how to play poker, and they aren't set in Caesars Palace, XS Nightclub, or a 2,000-seat showroom. They're about prostitutes, ex-cons, and the homeless, and they're set under Caesars Palace and in trailer parks and weekly motels. In this creative nonfiction collection, Matthew O'Brien--author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas--and veteran photographer Bill Hughes show a side of the city rarely seen. A side beyond the neon lights, themed facades, and motel-room doors. A side beyond the barbwire fences, No Trespassing signs, and midnight shadows.

Can he afford to gamble with his heart? Chris: Staff Sergeant Christopher Daniel Brooking plays life safe. Order, determination, and hard work have served him well in the Air Force, and he’s about to take the next step toward his life-long dream: becoming an officer. Unfortunately, the experimental officer training program that he’s been accepted to is in Las Vegas, the very epitome of the kind of life Chris detests the most. And even worse, the college student he’s been assigned as his “university guide” might be charming and adorable, but she’s also one of the most scatterbrained people he’s ever had the misfortune of working with. It will be a miracle if he can keep his carefully crafted routine intact while surviving the semester with her by his side. The more he gets to know the misadventurous, bubbly Skylar, however, the more he begins to realize that there might be more than his strict adherence to rules on the line. He might be in danger of losing his heart as well. *** Skylar: Las Vegas native, Skylar, doesn’t mean to get into scrapes. Nor does she mean to leave her homework on the printer at home or lock her keys in her car or blurt out whatever she’s thinking. But it happens, and because of her unfortunate...tendencies, she’s about to flunk out of one of her foundational hospitality courses. So when the chance to earn extra credit by helping a new Air Force student around the city for a semester is offered, Skylar jumps at it with gusto. She quickly realizes, however, that Chris Brooking is one of the handsomest, biggest squares Skylar has met. Never one to be intimidated by first impressions, though, she soldiers on and does her best to crack his shell to find the amazing person she’s sure is hiding beneath. In her attempt to unlock his secrets, however, Skylar ends up discovering truths of her own that she’d rather not face. So when the broody airman offers to help, she must decide whether she can bear to let him see the pain and insecurities she tries so hard to hide...or push him out forever. My Las Vegas Airman is the third book in the My Air Force Fairy Tale series, clean and wholesome standalone novels about life and love with military men. Read it today to find love, truth, and the magic of happily ever after.

Waking up next to a stranger wearing a wedding ring was not on the itinerary. I came to Las Vegas for a quick girl’s trip, but somehow ended up a married woman. What I thought would stay in Vegas followed me back to my small town of Sunrise Bay, Alaska. Of course, my new husband—MMA champion fighter, Logan Stone—couldn’t find me alone at my house to tell me he wants to give our impromptu nuptials a shot. He has to tell me in front of my entire family and half the town. The two of us couldn’t be more opposite, but he offers me a deal I can’t refuse which involves me pretending we’re happily married for three months. Yeah, a lot of things can change in that short amount of time, most importantly catching feelings for a man whose lifestyle I despise.

Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O’Brien’s adventures in subterranean Las Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a raging flood. He parties with naked crackheads. He learns how to make meth, that art is most beautiful where it’s least expected, that in many ways, he prefers underground Las Vegas to aboveground Las Vegas, and that there are no pots of gold under the neon rainbow.

Gambling personality Jean Scott shares her secrets to taking advantage of specials provided by casinos and low-rolling advantage-play techniques, discussing slot machines, video poker, comps, promotions, the ethics of gambling, and other related topics.

‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive ...”’

Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.