There’s no more-welcome sign of the summer reading season than Joe R. Lansdale’s Vanilla Ride, featuring the troublemaking and problem-solving escapades of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. The unlikely pair of crime fighters (Hap is a white, determinedly heterosexual, underemployed construction worker; Leonard is a black, loudly queer,…
On their new book, Desert Duty: On the Line With the U.S. Border Patrol.
In Tour de Lance, Bicycling magazine editor-at-large Bill Strickland uses Lance Armstrong’s return to the Tour de France after a three-year retirement as an opportunity to accompany him through nine grueling months of training and the race itself to take stock of a world-class athlete in a period…
San Antonio's Marshevet Hooker is not just any old high school sprinter; she's an Olympic gold medalist in the making. Meet her and nine other women we're betting will lead the new Texas—and the world.
In 2005, with seven adult mysteries under his belt, the San Antonio writer and teacher launched a series for kids: Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Now Harry Potter producer Chris Columbus has signed on to bring book one, The Lightning Thief, to the screen. Percy’s print adventures continue with book…
They were dubbed Texas’s Big Four for the long shadows they cast across the oil business. And Bryan Burrough, in his eminently readable biography The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, cuts through the not-entirely-false oilman stereotypes to tell us exactly how…
The Harvard researcher talks about his new book, The Happiness Advantage, and more.
On her new novel, The Personal History of Rachel Dupree, and more.
The 59-year-old Austin musician is a guitarist’s guitarist. His former band, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, put blues back on the pop charts in the mid-eighties with the single “Tuff Enuff.” After recording a duet album with his brother, Stevie Ray, who passed away soon afterward, he struck out on his own.
Since publishing his first novel, in 1976, the prolific author has won five Spur Awards in the western genre and four Shamus Awards for his mysteries. His sixty-fifth book zeroes in on the real-life obsession of Judge Roy Bean—one of nineteenth-century Texas’s most colorful jurists—with the British actress Lillie Langtry.
Austinite DOUG DORST follows up his darkly comic 2008 debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, with THE SURF GURU, a freewheeling fiction collection that ranges from a story about the neuroses of an Austin baker to a portrait of Vincent van Gogh’s bitterly jealous physician. Dorst draws inspiration from odd sources.
LET’S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME, a shimmeringly lovely second memoir from former Boston Globe books editor GAIL CALDWELL, opens with this brutally heartbreaking sentence: “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and we shared that too.” Caldwell, an Amarillo…
Galveston Island means much more than crab shacks and sunshine to ex-con Roy Cady, the narrator of NIC PIZZOLATTO’s gritty noir debut, GALVESTON. In the year 2008, Galveston is where the former mob goon—now a hunched-over, patch-eyed, dried-out drunk—takes twelve-step meetings at the local Finest Donuts. Twenty years earlier, it…
The 47-year-old Rice University professor has taken a hard left turn in his writing career, following up his acclaimed literary novel The Summer Guest (2004) with the just-published The Passage, volume one of a near-future sci-fi trilogy populated by violent vampires (not the dreamy romantics we’ve seen of late) and…
Entertainment Weekly staffer Karen Valby visited Utopia (population 241) in 2006 for an article about American backwaters relatively untouched by popular culture. Intrigued, she returned to research her first book, Welcome to Utopia (Notes from a Small Town), a deftly executed look at the stereotype of a one-horse…
Just Don’t Call Me Ma’am’s subtitle—How I Ditched the South for the Big City, Forgot My Manners, and Managed to Survive My Twenties With (Most of) My Dignity Still Intact—might be unwieldy, but it provides a handy précis of this colorful memoir about the not-always-glamorous adventures of a young advertising…
Loyal Ledford of Huntington, West Virginia, is the unassuming central figure of THE MARROWBONE MARBLE COMPANY, the lyrical second novel from Texas State grad GLENN TAYLOR, whose debut, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. Ledford’s world is shaped by three…
LOUIS SACHAR’S young-adult novel Holes spent more than 175 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, which sets a daunting commercial benchmark for the Austin author’s new effort, THE CARDTURNER. In a move that should deflate retailers’ expectations, Sachar has written a teen book about that most complex and…
The San Antonio author has exhibited an impressive sense of worldliness with his literary mysteries, the settings of which range from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to twentieth-century Florida. The Devil’s Company, his sixth novel, returns to eighteenth-century London, where pugilist-turned-PI Benjamin Weaver—who first appeared in A Conspiracy of Paper and later…
It took four novels for Steve Hockensmith to steer his sleuthing ranch hand brothers, Gustav “Old Red” and Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer, to Texas, but the budding town of San Marcos circa 1893 proves a fine fit for The Crack in the Lens and its unpretentious brand of…
The former music editor for the Dallas Observer was just another Texas teen when metal rockers Pantera emerged from Arlington in the nineties and went on to sell millions of records and concert tickets worldwide. In BLACK TOOTH GRIN: THE HIGH LIFE, GOOD TIMES, AND TRAGIC END OF “DIMEBAG” DARRELL…
In the West Texas town of Alpine, Hugh MacLeod writes Gaping Void, a cheeky blog he launched in August 2001 with the deadpan tagline “Cartoons Drawn on the Back of Business Cards.” Now a 13,000-word essay from the Web site has spawned his first book, Ignore Everybody (and…
First published in England in 2008, The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money is the kind of inventive, intelligent fiction that now deserves to make a splash stateside for Dallas-bred Thomas Leveritt. Set in Sarajevo circa 2002, it is a sly, tragicomic exploration of commerce, politics, and romance in…
Rookie novelist Clancy Martin displays a veteran’s savvy when he grabs the reader on the opening page of How to Sell: “The first time I considered jewelry was the morning I stole my mother’s wedding ring. It was white gold. A hundred-year-old Art Nouveau band with eleven diamonds.”…
An interview with José P. Ramirez Jr. After being diagnosed in 1968 with Hansen’s disease—more commonly known as leprosy—at the age of twenty, Ramirez was taken from his hometown of Laredo to a leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, then the only such facility in North America. In SQUINT: MY JOURNEY WITH…
One year before moving into a small cabin near Walden Pond, 26-year-old Henry David Thoreau accidentally started a fire in Concord Woods that destroyed nearly three hundred acres. In his debut novel, Woodsburner, Austinite John Pipkin identifies that 1844 conflagration as a likely catalyst for Thoreau’s retreat from…
Having won the National Book Award for 2007’s fever-dreamed Tree of Smoke, former Texas State professor Denis Johnson does a 180 with Nobody Move, a slim but engaging caper novel. Where his previous effort was literarily complex and fraught with geopolitics, the current offering is straight-up crime fiction.
After their two-year-old son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004, the author and his wife, Kristin, struggled with the challenge of finding effective treatment for an incontinent, uncommunicative child given to intractable tantrums. The Horse Boy: A father’s quest to heal his son tells of their journey to…
Jeff Guinn’s Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde is an entertaining, meticulously researched biography that gleans fact from the fables that grew up around this Depression-era outlaw duo. Clyde Barrow was the son of a junk man in the slums of west Dallas,…
Stick a thumb into any page of Paulette Jiles’s The Color of Lightning and you’ll pull out a fine prose plum. The San Antonio author has trademarked an offhand lyricism, and she displays it amply in this intelligent Civil War–era novel: “Britt and Mary slept with the two…
The future has seldom been a copacetic place in sci-fi swami Bruce Sterling’s works of fiction. His eleventh novel, The Caryatids, is set in the bleak year 2065. A global nuclear and climatological disaster has devastated great nation-states like India and America; China has emerged as the ravaged…
In the sixties and seventies, transplanted Houstonian Donald Barthelme made a splash in the New York literary world with short stories and novels like Snow White and The Dead Father. With Hiding Man, one of his former students—now a distinguished professor of English and creative writing at…
We probably didn’t need another comic novel about life at an absurdly bureaucratic and insular American university, but Houston memoirist Emily Fox Gordon gets a pass for her well-honed and earthy satire It Will Come to Me. Ruth Blau is a 56-year-old faculty wife; her husband, Ben, chairs…
An extended interview with the author of Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War.
In light of the American military’s increasing dependence on corporate entities, Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War questions our government’s ability to oversee massively profitable armed forces contracts. The author, who lives in Oakland, California, is the managing editor of the investigative…
In the twenty-first century, when the American consumer can choose from among hundreds of flat-screen TVs, David Eagleman’s pocket-size work of philosofiction, Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives, is nothing if not culturally consistent: With both a childlike sense of wonder and a trenchant flair for irony, the…
In a sense, Marion Stone, the narrator of Abraham Verghese’s sparkling first novel, Cutting for Stone, is a dramatically enhanced doppelgänger of his creator. Like Verghese, he is born in Ethiopia to Indian parents, becomes a physician, and relocates to America (Verghese moved in the eighties to Tennessee,…
Sex, Death & Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover’s World Tour captures the Houston food writer at his best, offering culinary insight, scientific fact, and offbeat humor as he travels the globe in search of the truth about oysters (including their alleged resemblance to the female anatomy and occasional fatal effects). His…
A sense of imminent and unskirtable dread hangs like woodsmoke over Texas native Scott Blackwood’s finely wrought first novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here. Not for the chronically depressed, it is a downbeat parable about life in a middle-class Austin whose residents were born under the proverbial…
Before his 2003 deployment to Iraq, Army staff sergeant and San Antonio resident Eric Maddox was a military interrogator with virtually no field experience in his area of expertise. Mission: Black List #1, written with Davin Seay, tells the story of his on-the-job training in Tikrit, where…
Ghosts, cemetery dogs, and immortals populate The Messenger, a supernatural thriller from mystery writer Jan Burke, a Houston native best known for her award-winning series starring flesh-and-blood reporter Irene Kelly. The Messenger features Tyler Hawthorne, whose 2008 Los Angeles mailing address belies his 1815 service as a…
An extended interview with Jef Guinn, author of The Christmas Chronichles.
At 735 pages, The Christmas Chronicles might inspire a deeply felt ho-ho-ho-hum from the Santa-averse. But don’t shun these three newly compiled “as told to” Yule novels from the Fort Worth author (The Autobiography of Santa Claus, How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas, and The Great Santa Search). With their…
With his twenty-second book, Traitor to His Class, the acclaimed historian and University of Texas at Austin professor brings yet another political giant into focus: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Do you explode any myths in Traitor to His Class? The rich of Roosevelt’s day blamed him for selling them out…
The Glen Rock Book of the Dead is a quiet tour de force from former Austinite Marion Winik, who ruminates on the meaning and messages to be culled from the deaths (and lives) of fifty-plus individuals who have crossed her path. Within a slim 108 pages, she provides…
First the bad news: Alan Govenar’s Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound is maddening, a six-hundred-page patchwork of illustrations, interviews, and essays adapted and expanded from his previous works. Sometimes organized by place (East Texas, Austin) and sometimes by theme (zydeco, the saxophone), it affords such…
The stereotypical image of America’s middle class—successful adults shepherding worthy children toward better lives—is turned on its head in Andrew Porter’s beautifully executed short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter. Porter, who teaches creative writing at Trinity University, pulls us through the looking glass into a…
With his twenty-second book, Traitor to His Class, the acclaimed historian and University of Texas at Austin professor brings yet another political giant into focus: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Do you explode any myths in Traitor to His Class? The rich of Roosevelt’s day blamed him for selling them…
