Two days later this month might just answer this question: Is Las Vegas ready?

Not for professional football. Or the NHL.

A highly praised and proudly off-beat literary magazine, where contributors have ranged from Nick Hornby and Anne Carson to Leslie Jamison and Daniel Handler, is changing ownership.

Art comes out of chaos,” culture critic David L. Ulin — now a fellow at UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute — said at last year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. “Culture comes out of chaos.” If so, we’re in for some culture-fat times, as the nation’s new political order appears to be a chaos engine: rewriting social norms, destabilizing old certainties and posing fundamental questions about — some would say challenges to — what it means to be an American.

The Black Mountain Institute at UNLV just turned 10. The international literary center grants fellowships and degrees, holds readings and panels, and provides asylum to persecuted writers.

You could evaluate the first decade of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute in terms of speakers who spoke, fellows who wrote and literary journals published.

Violence has been part of human storytelling probably since the first human told the first story. Today, it remains a literary drawing card for readers of all genres.

Writing a novel is an unavoidably solitary endeavor, and maybe that’s why so many novelists seem to enjoy talking with readers once their books have been published.

UNLV's Black Mountain Institute is a home for both new and established writers to hone their craft.

We’ve all heard stories about someone coming out of a brain injury with creative skills they had never had before. And we know that some of our most creative artists have suffered from mental illness.

A literary pilgrimage here? No way. Too many books set in Vegas. Too grim. Too predictable.

Las Vegas may not be filled with as many academics as Boston, Washington, D.C., or the Bay Area, but Southern Nevada has a growing literary community.

Who owns the land?

That question has dominated the long and complicated history of the America West.