Austin—has steered clear of Lone Star State stories. That changes this month with the release of Prince Avalanche, loosely based on the 2011 Icelandic movie Either Way. Set in 1988 on a lonely stretch of East Texas highway, the film follows two mismatched screwups (Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch) who have arrived to repaint highway lines in the aftermath of devastating forest fires. One part buddy comedy, one part coming-of-middle-age reverie, it’s an exceedingly small-scale effort that certainly won’t be confused with the summer’s CGI blockbusters. What it offers, instead, is a poignant reaffirmation of a classic Texas theme: the idea that, no matter how broken your heart or how ravaged your surroundings, it’s never too late to start over. David Gordon Green might have taken a while to do his state fully proud, but a Texas movie this generous and tender was worth waiting for. —Christopher Kelly

5. What We Talk About When We Talk About the Border

In “Baby Money,” the first story in Ito Romo’s collection The Border Is Burning (University of New Mexico Press), the Rio Grande has overflowed its banks during a tropical storm and flooded the Nuevo Laredo home of a woman who is forced to take her two small children and flee to her sister’s “cardboard house across town.” When she finally returns, she discovers that the waters have delivered to her home a deformed fetus floating in its formaldehyde bath—a sideshow attraction at a nearby carnival that was also inundated by the river. “The two-headed baby, still in its giant mayonnaise jar, was half-buried in the muddy floor,” Romo writes. There’s a $500 reward on offer, money the woman and her children desperately need. But she looks at the misshapen creature, places the jar on her bed, drapes a crown of plastic flowers around the lid, and descends into a rage, yelling, “I don’t want your dammit baby money,” over and over. Not every story in this San Antonio artist and writer’s first collection is quite so effective—Romo deals in very short stories, and a few of them never transcend their fragmentary nature—but more often than not these South Texas meth addicts, lonely hearts, aimless teens, brutalized lovers, and part-time Walmart employees stake a claim on our attention and our sympathy in a few brief pages. In other hands, this material might come off as lurid or exploitative. But Romo never goes there—his gaze is something finer, at once pitiless and merciful.