LAS VEGAS — On a recent very warm Saturday afternoon, just a few blocks northeast of a string of ramshackle chapels offering Elvis-themed weddings on Las Vegas Boulevard, the novelist Tommy Orange was discussing the critical reception given to “There There,” his polyphonic novel about contemporary Native Americans.

Orange was speaking at the third annual Believer Festival, three days of performances, panels and parties that are part of a burgeoning literary scene here. As high-low splits go, it is a tough scene to beat.

With irregular regularity, various places in the United States that are not the Big Obvious Centers start throwing off a more concentrated number of cultural sparks: Austin, Tex.; Seattle; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Atlanta. Las Vegas might not seem the most obvious place to join this list. The Strip is still, and ever shall be, as Joan Didion described it, “bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.” But a recent infusion of money, people and The Believer, a literary magazine, have kindled an already present bookish community into a steadier flame.

The hub of this resurgence (or, to coin a term, surgence) is the Black Mountain Institute, a literary center that operates out of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. When Joshua Wolf Shenk was named the executive and artistic director of the institute in 2015 — after the retirement of Carol Harter, who founded B.M.I. in 2006 — he was not planning to also become the editor in chief of a magazine. But soon after beginning his tenure, Shenk talked to The Believer, then published by McSweeney’s and based in San Francisco, about cooperating on a live event in Vegas.