The Gay Case
How two Texans took a gay rights case to the Supreme Court.
Reviews, profiles, and interviews that capture the diverse voices adding to Texas’s rich literary tradition
How two Texans took a gay rights case to the Supreme Court.
James Carlos Blake’s latest novel explores the sins of the grandfather.
Cyberpunk pioneer Bruce Sterling speculates that the worst is yet to come.
Is it time to revisit Larry McMurtry’s Berrybender Narratives?
Fifty years after it first electrified the nation, Dallas native John Howard Griffin’s classic book still has something to tell us.
In Donna M. Johnson's memoir of a Pentecostal childhood, religious zeal and illicit love nearly tear a family apart.
Is the Freddie Steinmark saga the greatest story ever oversold?
Fort Worth preacher J. Frank Norris paved the way for today’s televangelists. But he’s probably best known as the defendant in a wild 1927 murder trial.
Babe Didrikson’s pioneering career as a woman golfer.
Texas Christian University Press, long the hub of Elmer Kelton hagiography, has just released its newest paterikon, Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories ($19.95), a collection of pieces written in honor of the beloved West Texas author, who died nearly two years ago. Among the memories are those of the Reverend
An excerpt from Chapter One.
An excerpt from Volume 8.
A new Crockett biography by Michael Wallis weighs in on how Davy died.
IntroductionYes, I do have a Texas connection, but, as we’d say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so’s you’d know it. I come from an immigrant family. Although my father sounded like Harry Truman and freely used phrases like “Haven’t had so much fun since the hogs ate
"Readings," by Sandra Scofield with Jessica Scofield.
Read an excerpt from a new novel by Taylor Stevens.
Read an excerpt from a new novel by Mat Johnson.
Read an excerpt from a new book by Rhonda Lashley Lopez.
Read an excerpt from a new book by Maurice Sherif.
Stratfor’s George Friedman peers into the future.
How Alan Lomax rebelled against—and saved a few—Texas traditions.
The author of The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream talks about peddling history and more.
A new novel by Ann Weisgarber.
On her new novel, The Personal History of Rachel Dupree, and more.
Larry McMurtry’s new memoir plays it close to the vest.
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
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
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
The closings of bookstores in San Antonio and Laredo leave a void that can’t be filled with a Kindle.
The founder of the Texas Innocence Network, who is also the litigation director at the Texas Defender Service and a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, uses his hard-won knowledge of the state legal system to maximum effect in his fifth book, The Autobiography of an Execution.
The award-winning dramatist (Signs of Life: Six Comedies of Menace) looks to the Texas roots of novelist Patricia Highsmith to explain the traits and compulsions that informed her life. In The Talented Miss Highsmith, she explores the crime writer’s journals and love letters to reveal a complex and erratic
Hey, movie people, leave Cormac McCarthy alone!
The Massachusetts-born journalist has never been afraid to rankle the establishment: In 1971 he obtained the infamous Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg, which uncovered the government’s secret history of the war in Vietnam, and his 1988 Vietnam exposé, A Bright Shining Lie, earned him a National Book Award and a
Colum McCann’s new novel revolves around Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974.
The photographer talks about her new book and life on skates.
At 73, the Brownsville native has had a recording renaissance.
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
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
Cormac McCarthy’s ubiquity problem.
In this excerpt from writer-at-large Sarah Bird’s new novel, How Perfect Is That, the realities of life in early twenty-first century Austin become all-too-clear to a defrocked socialite.
As the father of the golf novel (exhibit A: Dead Solid Perfect, circa 1974), Fort Worth’s Dan Jenkins holds license in perpetuity to exercise the genre’s clichés, which he does with relish in The Franchise Babe. Self-absorbed pro golfers and sizzling golf moms in “jacked-up minis” are just
San Antonio–born journalist Marie Brenner borrowed her memoir’s title, Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, from the childhood nickname given to her and her older brother, Carl, with whom she was endlessly at odds. The nickname takes on a more literal aspect when Carl
A decade of research by this University of Texas at Austin psychology prof has led to new ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and the spaces they inhabit, as he now reveals with Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.Snoop posits that our possessions open a window onto
In The Big Sort, the Austin political blogger and Pulitzer finalist addresses America’s tendency to segment itself into tiny, like-minded groups (a phenomenon he calls clustering).How did the “big sort” notion come to be, and what does it signify?[Sociologist] Robert Cushing and I began exploring why some places
Word is that Ben Rehder might drop the curtain on his snarky Blanco County mystery series with Holy Moly, the sixth novel featuring square-jawed Johnson City game warden John Marlin. If so, the Austinite goes out on a high note with this screwball tale about “pastorpreneur” Peter Boothe,
In The Big Sort, the Austin political blogger and Pulitzer finalist for editorial writing addresses America’s tendency to segment itself into tiny, like-minded groups (a phenomenon he calls “clustering”).How did the “big sort” notion come to be, and what does it signify?[Sociologist] Robert Cushing and I began exploring
The best-selling Houston-based writer sets her new novel, The Palace of Illusions, in the fifth millennium BCE. Based on India’s epic Mahabharat poem, it examines love and war from the perspective of Princess Panchaali. (Read an excerpt.)The Palace of Illusions is a re-imagining of the
Like Joe Ely, Jo Carol Pierce grew up in the dusty vacuum of Lubbock, and though she was part of the town’s famed clique of talent, only in her late forties did she begin to take her writing seriously. She penned and performed Bad Girls Upset by the Truth,
The first time nine-year-old Booger Red got drunk on beer, he decided, “I had already fucked up more ways than God was going to put up with . . . so I had in mind, the sky’s the limit from here on, I mean I can’t go to hell twice.”