A vivid exploration of Las Vegas—where illusion, risk, and reinvention shape a city unlike any other—part of Travel with a Writer, The Walking Tree’s series pairing leading authors with the places they know best.

“Once the sun is up, the city can burst into flames at any moment.”

Las Vegas. Sin City and Marriage Capital of the World. An oasis of glitz and gaiety in the middle of a forbidding desert landscape. A hotbed of aspirations and desires and frustrations, of risks and rewards and constantly looming calamity. An accelerated, overstimulated, insomniac distillation of the American dream: anything can happen, and usually does. 

Jérôme Schmidt first came to Vegas two decades ago as an observer, and has returned every year since—as an explorer, an adventure seeker, and finally a part-time local, drawn again and again into its shimmering vortex of gambling and vice, luxury and squalor. In this bold, inquisitive tour of the town, we veer off the Strip, where everything (literally) glows with the sense of possibility, and peek behind the spectacle at a city altogether stranger—and more human—than the legend suggests.

Schmidt’s Las Vegas invites us into a city shaped not just by high rollers and legendary mobsters but also by showgirls and taxi drivers, architects and activists, foodies and fabulists, worshippers and scammers, all chasing their dreams and seeking their fortunes, knowing that ruin is never too far behind.