Perhaps more suited to Texas' literary past is an oral history of storytelling. Texas Bound recreates this legacy in its compilation of stories on tape, read by Texas actors for the Dallas Museum of Art's annual Arts and Letters Live series. Having already garnered rave reviews for its first two audiocassettes -- notable performances on the first cassette hosted by Tess Harper include Tommy Lee Jones' reading of Larry McMurtry's only published short story, "There Will Be Peace In Korea," on which the novel The Last Picture Show was based, and Lawrence Wright's University of Texas memoir, "Escape," read by actor Randy Moore (who served as the project director during its first four seasons), the tapes give additional life to the stories, providing nuances that help take the experience over and above what the typical reader might create in his/her head.

The standout in the second series of tapes, hosted by G.W. Bailey, is SMU graduate Kathy Bates' reading of Janet Peery's "What the Thunder Said." Bates' performance brings the words off the page with the same fervor that keeps the story's heroine -- a boarder on a farm -- from confronting the man she has been sleeping with, with her feelings of love for him.

And Houston-born Brent Spiner, who we recognize from his role as Lt. Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, does justice to the comic exuberance of Matt Clark's "The West Texas Sprouting of Loman Happenstance."

The newest collection of stories for the ear, Texas Bound III, hosted by Barry Corbin, comes out this month with performances by Frasier's Peri Gelpin and screen actress Marcia Gay Harden (The Spitfire Grill, The Daytrippers). According to the New York Times, Corbin's rendition of Tom Doyal's "Sick Day," a small story about the ennui experienced by a car salesman who stays home one day with a cold, "brought the house down, Texas style." Anyone who has attended Selected Shorts on tour, or any kind of story reading series knows it's the readers who make or break this type of performance. The Texas Bound series is a quality one. Hearing the stories read on tape by proficient actors adds a dimension to the characters, cementing in our minds their speech patterns and mannerisms along with their circumstances. In their most basic sense, stories are meant to be heard, and sometimes the distance between a mouth and an ear can make all the difference.

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