abstract:Gary Michael Krist (born 1957) is an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, travel journalism, and literary criticism. Before turning to narrative nonfiction with The White Cascade (2007), a book about the 1910 Wellington avalanche, and City of Scoundrels (2012), about Chicago's tragic summer of 1919, Krist wrote three novels--Bad Chemistry (1998), Chaos Theory (2000), and Extravagance (2002).