Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
 

Andrew Porter

The Theory of Light and Matter

University of Georgia Press

The stereotypical image of America’s middle class—successful adults shepherding worthy children toward better lives—is turned on its head in Andrew Porter’s beautifully executed short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter. Porter, who teaches creative writing at Trinity University, pulls us through the looking glass into a world where adults suffer from failed careers or sexual confusion and their offspring are underachievers at best or, at worst, mentally “not right.” There’s a crisp economy to these stories that nicely underpins their offbeat narratives: brawling Amish teenagers in “Departure”; a gay exchange student who inspires jealousies in both his host parents in “Azul”; and the failed filmmaker in “Coyotes,” who deserts his family and leaves behind only a photograph of himself and his wife, in happier days, “leaning slightly into the wind, bracing themselves against something they cannot yet see.” University of Georgia Press, $24.95

Alan Govenar

Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound

Texas A&M University Press

First the bad news: Alan Govenar’s Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound is maddening, a six-hundred-page patchwork of illustrations, interviews, and essays adapted and expanded from his previous works. Sometimes organized by place (East Texas, Austin) and sometimes by theme (zydeco, the saxophone), it affords such key artists as T-Bone Walker and Big Mama Thornton a scant two or three pages each. Nevertheless, Texas Blues succeeds by how it captures the voices of workaday singers and players for whom the blues is a way of life, with unvarnished stories from people like “Whistling” Alex Moore, who learned to play by sneaking practice time on pianos in houses where he delivered groceries, and Ray Sharpe, whose stuttering R&B chestnut “Linda Lu” has taken him around the world. Texas Blues is glossy but not slick—and it is plenty real. Texas A&M University Press, $40

Marion Winik

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead

Counterpoint

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead is a quiet tour de force from former Austinite Marion Winik, who ruminates on the meaning and messages to be culled from the deaths (and lives) of fifty-plus individuals who have crossed her path. Within a slim 108 pages, she provides spot-on epitaphs (with a nod to Spoon River Anthology) for childhood friends (“The Virgin”), in-laws (“The Bad Brother”), and troubled acquaintances (“The Burning Man”). Winik has a gift for the telling phrase—it requires only a slight squint to visualize the main character in “The Dentist,” for example, who, post-divorce, “had the kind of sudden insight into his life that requires shiny vehicles and foreign travel.” Having notoriously laid herself bare in previous memoirs (First Comes Love chronicled her heroin addiction and her husband’s death from AIDS), Winik proves equally adept at exposing the souls of others. Counterpoint, $20

H. W. Brands

H. W. Brands
Courtesy of Barton Wilder Custom Images

With his twenty-second book, Traitor to His Class, the acclaimed historian and University of Texas at Austin professor brings yet another political giant into focus: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Do you explode any myths in Traitor to His Class?

The rich of Roosevelt’s day blamed him for selling them out to the masses; their heirs blame the New Deal for the growth of government ever since. Both groups fail to consider the alternatives: not laissez-faire but American fascism. Roosevelt betrayed his class, but he rescued his country and proved the best friend the rich ever had.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a sociopolitical force in her own right. Did she and FDR cross swords?

Eleanor was typically to the left of FDR on social issues, such as race. She would tell liberals that he was on their side in his heart but the conservatives in Congress wouldn’t let him do more; he would tell those conservatives that she spoke for her-self, and who can control the missus?

How did your views on FDR change in the course of writing?

I came to believe he was a political genius. He almost single-handedly transformed Americans’ expectations of their government at home and of their country abroad. We still live in the world he created. Doubleday, $35 (Read the full interview.)