"What we do have these days in terms of Texas and the Southwest -- and have had for longer than some critics will admit -- is a varied body of talented people producing books and stories and poems and essays of real merit, writings that are well worth reading not just for what they say but for how they say it as well."

Including stories by Texas literary emissaries Sandra Cisneros, Dagoberto Gilb, Miles Wilson, Annette Sanford, Carolyn Osborn, and Katherine Anne Porter, Graves' statement is not to imply that the newest Texas Bound doesn't contain stories with a wonderful regionality to them. John Bennet's "Flat Creek Road," the tale of an impoverished yet happy childhood in Horace among the bull nettles and sour dock, conjures an image of rural East Texas that rivals the poignant descriptions of backwoods New England that E. Annie Proulx pens. Dagoberto Gilb's "The Prize," introduces readers to Chino, a bordertown barber concerned that he has the power of witchcraft.

But other stories take detours, transcending their Texas boundaries by illustrating a humanness that comes first, before the affect an environment might have on a character or a situation. While San Antonio native Sandra Cisnero's "Barbie-Q" conveys a sentiment of urban blight, it also acts as an anthem for the girlhood Barbie doll experience, as timeless and placeless as pre-adolescence itself. "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," by 1993 Pulitzer prizewinner Robert Olen Butler, is a fantastical internal missive, wherein a paranoid husband has been changed into a parrot in a pet shop, and is purchased by the widow whose perceived infidelity still haunts him. Probably the oddest story of the bunch -- and interestingly enough, the lead piece in the anthology -- is Donald Barthelme's "The School," which explores the cycle of life and death in the way that theater of the absurd might tackle the subject, a remarkably comic vignette whose intellectual aspirations deem it "literature" for sure.

on to An Oral Tradition