One Amazing Thing is a beautiful novel, a tapestry of nine stories from Houston’s Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, whose short fiction earned her an American Book Award in 1996. Seven potential travelers in an unnamed U.S. city are applying for documents at an Indian Consulate when an earthquake razes the building and traps them in the visa office along with two consular employees. After a couple of cold, disheartening days in the flooded agency, the fractious group agrees to pass the time by telling tales of “one amazing thing” that has happened in their lives. Plot device aside, the backstories that Divakaruni spins are brilliantly inventive windows into unfamiliar territory for the Western reader, such as the Sino-Indian War of 1962 (which sends Jiang, a Chinese Indian woman, into an arranged marriage that lets her escape to America) or India’s social strata (Malathi, a would-be bride in Coimbatore, defies her parents and the caste system by taking a job in the beauty salon where she is sent to be made up for a photo meant to attract potential suitors). For the tellers, the tales provide catharsis—a minute of grace as they pray for rescue. Divakaruni captures the power of those moments to create a passionate, intelligent book that sings with humanity. Voice, $23.99
First-time author and Austinite Robert Jackson Bennett takes a solemn approach to genre fiction, with nary a light moment in his allegorical horror novel, Mr. Shivers. Set in the Depression-era Southwest, the saga follows Marcus Connelly, who leaves his wife and Memphis home to ride the rails west in pursuit of a scar-faced “shiver-man” who has murdered his young daughter, Molly. In a Hooverville in Missouri, three fellow travelers seeking “Mr. Shivers” for similar reasons—Reverend Pike, Jakob Hammond, and Mr. Roosevelt—muster around Connelly and head with him toward New Mexico to exact revenge. Their quarry’s preternatural qualities will soon give them pause: How does he appear, kill, and disappear in the blink of an eye? Do dust storms follow wherever he goes? Is he the devil or death itself? Too late it becomes clear that the wanderers’ own double-edged morals may turn them into the very kind of fiend they hate most. As Connelly’s wife tells him before he leaves, “The man who goes out there and the man who comes back won’t be the same.” Mr. Shivers travels a joyless terrain—Cormac McCarthy’s The Road comes to mind—but Bennett’s obsession with the nature of pure evil holds a promise of interesting things to come. Orbit, $19.99
David R. Dow
David R. Dow
Photograph by Katya Glockner-Dow
The founder of the Texas Innocence Network, who is also the litigation director at the Texas Defender Service and a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, uses his hard-won knowledge of the state legal system to maximum effect in his fifth book, The Autobiography of an Execution. Both opponents and advocates of the death penalty will find grist for their mills in this detailed account of prisoners who live in the shadow of their sentence and the public defenders who are charged with keeping them alive. Dow has represented more than one hundred death row inmates.
How many Texas inmates are currently on death row? There are 332 death row inmates in Texas. Ten are women. In 2009 twenty-four were executed.
You’re opposed to the death penalty. Is that a moral position or—not to be callous—a practical one? I was not opposed to it when I started this work, twenty years ago. Over the years, I have changed my mind. Initially, it was, as you characterize it, a practical consideration: There was no way to make the system fair. Eventually my position became a more purely moral one. I simply believe it is wrong to kill. It is wrong when my clients kill, and they should be punished. But it is also wrong when the state kills.
What do you think people most commonly misunderstand about death row? I suspect that many people assume that the murderers on death row are the worst of the worst. In my experience, that assumption is false. Murders range from despicable and cruel to unspeakably detestable and vile, but most of the people on death row committed a murder that is identical to a murder committed by someone who is not on death row. There is just a staggering degree of randomness to it. If you are wealthy and kill someone, you will almost certainly not end up on death row. If you are white and you murder someone who is black, you will almost certainly not end up on death row.
In the book, you mix and match elements of different cases. Why is that? I was, and am, very concerned about my professional obligation to maintain the confidentiality of my clients. They need to be able to talk to me without worrying that one day their story will be a vignette in a book. That said, everything I describe in the book really happened.
How does the book address the 2007 case of Michael Richard, who was executed after your office failed in its efforts to file an appeal with Judge Sharon Keller? I talk about a case where the court closed before we were able to file pleadings, and people who know of the Richard litigation will recognize the basic outline of the drama. But this book is not about the Richard case. I use it more to illustrate what I perceive as the indifference of the courts to legitimate legal claims than to attack Judge Keller or any other judge. I think there is a long list of judges who are so interested in facilitating executions that they go out of their way to deny compelling legal claims.
It’s been reported recently that there has been a steep decline in death sentences imposed by Texas juries. What do you see behind this trend? I see three major factors: First, DNA exonerations have undermined the confidence that people have in the infallibility of prosecutors. Second, even though Texas has had de facto life without parole for many years, it has had actual life without parole only for a few. When people know they can send someone to prison for the rest of his life, they tend to err in that direction rather than voting for death. But the single biggest factor, I think, is the quality of representation at trial. Death penalty lawyers used to pay inadequate attention to jury selection and to the punishment phase of the trial; they spent their time, money, and energy on the guilt phase. Over the past ten years, defense lawyers have turned that upside down. Now the focus is on punishment, on getting a life sentence. In 2009 there were nine new death sentences in Texas, but there were also four other cases where prosecutors sought death and the jury refused, returning a life sentence instead. In other words, one third of the time, the jury rejected the prosecutor’s request. That is striking. Twelve, $24.99
An excerpt coming soon.
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