The Kitchen Confidential of the State Department.

You've seen them on the news, looking competent and concerned in their navy suits. They're in Beijing, Riyadh, Nairobi, Geneva, and of course Washington, DC. They look uneasy on camera. When they speak (which is as little as possible), it's with caution, hemmed in by protocol and the fear of causing an incident.

These are the diplomats.

Opening up a famously tight-lipped profession, State Department veteran Todd Pierce takes you backstage at the embassy, sharing what it's like to serve as a working-level diplomat.

Funny, revealing, pointed, and deeply human, Attaché Case tells what it feels like to represent the celebrity country-the US-a place everyone thinks they know and has an opinion about.

The Kitchen Confidential of the State Department.

You've seen them on the news, looking competent and concerned in their navy suits. They're in Beijing, Riyadh, Nairobi, Geneva, and of course Washington, DC. They look uneasy on camera. When they speak (which is as little as possible), it's with caution, hemmed in by protocol and the fear of causing an incident.

These are the diplomats.

Opening up a famously tight-lipped profession, State Department veteran Todd Pierce takes you backstage at the embassy, sharing what it's like to serve as a working-level diplomat.

Funny, revealing, pointed, and deeply human, Attaché Case tells what it feels like to represent the celebrity country-the US-a place everyone thinks they know and has an opinion about.

Las Vegas is considered a modern icon of excess. It offers every imaginable extreme of greed, pleasure, and despair, all supported by technology that enhances fantasy and allows residents and visitors alike to forget reality and responsibility. The authors of the fourteen stories in Dead Neon imagine Sin City in the near future, when excess has led to social, environmental, or economic collapse. Their stories range from futuristic casinos to the seared post-apocalyptic desert, from the struggle to survive in a repressive theocracy to the madness of living in a world where most life forms and all moral codes have vanished. Dead Neon explores the possible future of America by examining the near future of Las Vegas. The authors, all either Vegas-based or intimately familiar with the city, capture its unique rhythms and flavor and probe its potential for evoking the fullest range of the human spirit in settings of magic, horror, and despair.