What happens in Vegas stays in the family. Two dynasties merge in this trilogy debut from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Texas series. When Sallie Coleman abandons Texas to follow her dreams in Las Vegas, she never imagines she’ll win so soon—and so big. But a stroke of luck makes her the richest, most powerful businesswoman in Nevada, and in no time at all her transformation is complete—when she marries Philip Thornton and becomes Vegas’s most elegant first lady. Like her future mother-in-law before her, Pennsylvania beauty Fanny Logan makes her fortune in Vegas, building one of the city’s most successful clothing empires. Her wedding to Ash Thornton, the visionary behind the magnificent Babylon casino, is like a happy ending to their fairytale lives. But Ash’s greatest triumph may be his ultimate downfall . . . “[A] sweeping family saga reminiscent of her Texas series.” —Booklist “Through it all, Sallie remains a matriarch to be reckoned with, but her twin grandsons, Sage and Birch, appear to be the future of Vegas . . . for better or worse . . . if history doesn’t lie, Michaels won’t disappoint her fans.” —Kirkus Reviews “Her characters are well constructed.” —Publishers Weekly

Bittersweet, funny and touching, Larry McMurtry's The Desert Rose is the story of Harmony, a Las Vegas showgirl. At night she's a lead dancer in a gambling casino; during the day she raises peacocks. She's one of a dying breed of dancers, faced with fewer and fewer jobs and an even bleaker future. Yet she maintains a calm cheerfulness in that arid neon landscape of supermarkets, drive-in wedding chapels, and all-night casinos. While Harmony's star is fading, her beautiful, cynical daughter Pepper's is on the rise. But Harmony remains wistful and optimistic through it all. She is the unexpected blossom in the wasteland, the tough and tender desert rose.

This “brutal and unflinching” novel of fleeting love in Sin City inspired the film starring Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue (Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City). John O’Brien’s debut novel, Leaving Las Vegas, is an emotionally wrenching story of a woman who embraces life and a man who rejects it; a powerful tale of hard luck, hard drinking, and a relationship of tenderness and destruction. An avowed alcoholic, Ben drinks away his family, friends, and, finally, his job. With deliberate resolve, he burns the remnants of his life and heads for Las Vegas to end it all in the last great binge of his hopeless life. On the Strip, he picks up Sera, a prostitute, in what might have become another excess in his self-destructive jag. Instead, their chance meeting becomes a respite on the road to oblivion as they form a bond that is as mysterious as it is immutable.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Janet Maslin, The New York Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money? Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world. Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else. The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic. Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms. Praise for Empty Mansions “An amazing story of profligate wealth . . . an outsized tale of rags-to-riches prosperity.”—The New York Times “An evocative and rollicking read, part social history, part hothouse mystery, part grand guignol.”—The Daily Beast “Fascinating . . . [a] haunting true-life tale.”—People “One of those incredible stories that you didn’t even know existed. It filled a void.”—Jon Stewart, The Daily Show “Thrilling . . . deliciously scandalous.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Las Vegas Then and Now pairs vintage shots from 100 years of the city's history with the same view today.

Evaluates for the first time one of the foundational works in architecture criticism. Immediately on its publication in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, was hailed as a transformative work in the history and theory of architecture, liberating those in architecture who were trying to find a way out of the straitjacket of architectural orthodoxies. Resonating far beyond the professional and institutional boundaries of the field, the book contributed to a thorough rethinking of modernism and was subsequently taken up as an early manifestation and progenitor of postmodernism.

Sometimes what happens in Vegas doesn't stay there. Callyn Stott wakes up from a night-out at her friend Lara's Bachelorette party in Vegas with a hangover... and a wife. She's not really sure how she and her best friend Emma got hitched, only that they did and it's completely and totally legal. Callyn is used to getting in and out of scrapes, but this one takes the cake. Further complicating matters, Emma suggest that they stay married for "financial reasons" that don't really hold water. Not wanting to argue, Callyn agrees. The situation gets even more confusing when Callyn has to move out of her apartment, and where is she going to stay? With her fake wife, and best friend, of course. It's not like anything is going to happen. Things between the two of them have always been strictly platonic and best-friendy, right? Emma hasn't been secretly in love with Callyn her whole life and has just been waiting for Callyn to notice. No, surely not. Will Callyn get her head out of her ass and see what's right in front of her, or will she live the rest of her life oblivious that the one person she's always wanted is already there?

“A jam-packed finale” in the trilogy that follows the powerful legacy of the Thornton family from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Vegas Heat (Kirkus Reviews). Fanny Thornton Reed, proud matriarch of the Thornton dynasty, chooses her first husband’s illegitimate son Jeff to run Babylon, her family’s successful Las Vegas casino. For Jeff, this is a chance of a lifetime. For Fanny, it is a decision she will come to regret as it turns her children against each other. For the rightful Thornton heirs, it is their worst nightmare come true. Will jealousy and betrayal tear them apart once and for all—or will perseverance and love salvage the Thornton dream? Praise for Vegas Trilogy “[A] sweeping family saga reminiscent of her Texas series.” —Booklist “A fascinating family saga.” —Romantic Times “If history doesn’t lie, Michaels won’t disappoint her fans.” —Kirkus Reviews “Her characters are well constructed.” —Publishers Weekly

This is a reissue of the novel inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.