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Novels

Books|
January 20, 2013

Catcher in the Raw

Forty years after its publication, Horseman, Pass By is still one of Larry McMurtry's finest novels—and as groundbreaking as J. D. Salinger's masterpiece.

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Books|
January 20, 2013

King of Diamonds

Larry L. King is at work on a novel about minor league baseball in Texas in the fifties. Breaking Balls is a fictionalized account of his experiences covering the “miserable 144-game schedule” of the Midland Indians as a $55-a-week reporter for the Midland Reporter-Telegram in 1951. “I went to all

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Books|
January 20, 2013

The Texpatriates

As Sandra Scofield, Shelby Hearon, and Janet Peery are proving, you don’t have to live in Texas to be a Texas writer.

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Books|
April 30, 1999

David Hale Smith

David Hale Smith rejects more than three hundred manuscripts each month, but when he accepts one, publishers take note. Since 1994, when he left the tutelage of Dallas superagent Jan Miller and founded his own agency, DHS Literary, the thirty-year-old has established himself as one of the industry’s young lions,

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Books|
July 1, 1998

Desperately Seeking Cormac

Cormac McCarthy’s birth date and birthplace are just two of the facts about him that have eluded his rabid fans—until now. A dossier on the most fiercely private writer in Texas.

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Books|
May 31, 1998

Bond Plays On

SUNBURNED AND HUNGRY after a day of tubing down the Guadalupe, you head back to Austin for dinner at one of your favorite Tex-Mex restaurants—a garish, festive joint called Chuy’s. You are seated and slurping on a margarita when you spot a striking man in a nearby booth. A little

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Books|
May 31, 1998

James Lee Burke

I THINK I GOT interested in writing when I was in the fifth grade. I started writing short stories, and I remember wanting to get them published in the Saturday Evening Post. In high school I wrote a lot of poetry, but I wasn’t a good student; I think I

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Books|
May 31, 1998

Bass, Master

The first commandment of fiction writing is: Show, don’t tell. Rick Bass knows it well, though he still struggled through many drafts before finishing his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be (Houghton Mifflin, $25), which will be published this month. “Paint the images and trust the readers to

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Books|
November 1, 1997

Mary, Queen of Plots

For fans of Mary Willis Walker, May will be the merriest of months, for that’s when the Austinite’s fourth novel will hit stores. In All the Dead Lie Down (Doubleday, $22.95), her plucky protagonist, Lone Star Monthly reporter Molly Cates, springs into action to find her father’s killer and foil

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Books|
September 30, 1997

Writes of Passage

Getting published was supposed to be a cure-all, but for Austinite Louise Redd, it was just another chapter in the life of a struggling novelist.

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Kinky Friedman and Willie Nelson.
Books|
August 31, 1997

My Willie

Willie Nelson and I have been friends for years, so why did I decide only now to make him a character in one of my mystery novels? The plot thickens.

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Guides|
July 31, 1997

CD and Book Reviews

Hot CDsWest Texas bluesman Long John Hunter plays even more guitar than usual on Swinging From the Rafters (Alligator), and that’s a lot of guitar. Hunter represents the party-down end of the blues spectrum; he’s gotta poke fun at himself even when he’s ostensibly down-and-out, as on “I’m Broke.” With

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Guides|
June 30, 1997

CD and Book Reviews

Hot CDsThe real pleasure in Toni Price’s Sol Power (Antone’s/Discovery/Sire) is trying to peg her as country, blues, or folk. Whether she’s singing something silly and simple, such as “Cats and Dogs,” or taking the sultry and sublime route, as when she covers Allen Toussaint’s “Funky,” the Austinite offers an

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Books|
February 1, 1997

Space Cadet

Painful implants and alien abduction experiences may sound like science fiction, but to San Antonio writer Whitley Strieber, they’re frighteningly real.

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Books|
July 31, 1996

Nye Anxiety

San Antonio poet, essayist, and anthologist Naomi Shihab Nye is completing work on her first novel. The protagonist of Habibi (Simon and Schuster) is an Arab American teenage girl in present-day Jerusalem. The book is based, Nye says, on her own “travels and travails before coming to Texas” and explores

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Being Texan|
April 1, 1996

CD and Book Reviews

Hot CDsYes, it’s that Tiny Tim—albeit with a gruffer voice than you probably remember—singing with Denton polkaholics Brave Combo on Girl (Rounder). Together, the onetime tulip tiptoer and the 1995 Grammy nominees bip and bop through a set of standards (“Stardust”) and pop-rock faves (“Hey Jude”). The collaboration may not

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Books|
March 1, 1996

Colum McCann

Some words are worth a thousand pictures; such is the case with the image-rich writing of Colum McCann, whose first novel, Songdogs (Metropolitan Books, $22.50), has won praise from both The New Yorker and the New York Times. A native of Ireland, the 31-year-old credits Texas with jump-starting his career.

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