Heroes and Villains
Reviews, profiles, and interviews that capture the diverse voices adding to Texas’s rich literary tradition
This past year, Texas writers chased tornadoes, delved into devil worship, and pondered the etiquette of breast-feeding.
A saga of lust and revenge with a corpulent heroine establishes Carol Dawson as Texas' most promising new writer.
From The Manchurian Candidate to Prizzi’s Money, Richard Condon delivers wry thrillers readers can’t resist.
With eight books in print, David Lindsey has established his own gory niche in the world of mystery writers.
Eight indigenous authors, nine native critters: A bookish look at the wildest, woolliest creatures in Texas history.
Four quickie Branch Davidian books reveal that the full story has yet to come out.
Once a wild child, now a suburban mom, Marion Winik could be Texas’ next big literary success.
Houstonian Betty Ring’s Girlhood Emboidery is a richly illustrated survey of centuries-old needlework.
How 89-year-old Harvey Penick turned life’s lessons into a best-selling book—and followed it up with another master stroke.
Ross Perot’s new book says free trade will wreck the country. But his solution would do more harm than good.
In a chilling excerpt from his autobiography, the late John Connally offers his close-up account of the Kennedy assassination.
How the memoir of an unknown and homeless writer brought him fame and a place to live.
Larry McMurtry rallies Lonesome Dove’s geriatric survivors for a last perilous, meandering adventure in Streets of Laredo.
Renowned legal scholar and law professor Charles Alan Wright is deadly serious—about murder mysteries.
For years he renounced his Texas ties. Now Larry McMurty is once again calling Archer City home.
Hacker Crackdown tells how the feds busted employees of a Texas games company for a crime they didn’t commit.
This fall, photographer Jim Arndt and Western props supplier Tyler Beard visited the annual event in Burnet to chew the fat with many of the craftsmen featured in The Cowboy Boot Book (Peregrine Smith Books), their pictorial guide to fancy footgear. Arndt and Beard have dressed Western
Being the nation’s most famous interpreter of Texas politics sounds like fun. But for Molly Ivins, success has been no laughing matter.
Elvis fans will have their very own sightings in a new book, In Search of Elvis, just published by the Summit Group in Fort Worth ($12.95). The cartoon book is a knockoff of the prodigiously successful Where’s Waldo? children’s series, but Summit’s publicity coordinator Bryan Drake suspects that more parents
El Paso author Cormac McCarthy has always shunned fame, but his latest novel may nally force him into the spotlight.
As the sole studio photographer in Granger from 1924 to 1955, John Trlica recorded on film most of the important occasions—public and private—in the Central Texas farming community. Because Trlica kept meticulous records and saved every negative, his shop became the repository for an intensely documented history of a small
Beyond Beef blames cattle for the decline of civilization—not to mention famine, pestilence, destruction, and death.
An Alabama Klansman posing as a folksy Texas novelist almost pulled off the literary hoax of the century.
Photograph by George Krause
Brown’s formula for success guarantees a happy ending.
Oilman, sports-man, high liver, Clint Murchison also knew how to write a good letter.
My eyes are on the road ahead, but my ears are in a book.
The Raven’s Bride sheds new light on the scandal that set Tennessee governor Sam Houston on the road to Texas.
Larry McMurtry returns to the mythic West and spins a thoughtful and touching tale.
An outsider exposes the hidden risks in Odessa’s bigger-than-life brand of football.
A new assault on Texas’ most cherished myth proves that the Battle of the Alamo is far from over.
Three new books deliver sordid stories of drugged-up cops, kinky murderers, and a real-life drug kingpin.
Robert A. Caro has spent fifteen years writing his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson. He is halfway through.
The young—and even the not-so-young-can travel back through the state’s glorious past simply by opening up any one of these fourteen children’s classics.
Five beautifully produced books explore the Americas, from anonymous folk art to the great muralists, from revolutionary heroes to a Texas ranching patriarch.
Larry McMurtry explores the far side of forty in his new novel.
Dallas novelist C. W. Smith takes a long, hard look at a subject with a painful history.
A fresh look at the U.S. war with Mexico shows that the effects of this forgotten conflict are still being felt today.
Dave Hickey’s fine short stories are enhanced by the scarcity; Texas expatriate William Humphrey takes on the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears.
New fiction takes the reader on forays into Louisiana swamps, excursions into smoke-filled Austin honky-tonks, and down life’s highway with a lady trucker
Dan Jenkins’ latest takes a tough-cookie journalist out of a thirties movie and puts her into a chase through Depression-era Fort Worth; Sarah Glasscock populates her fictional Alpine with a cast of real characters.
In Anything for Billy, Larry McMurtry trounces the Western myth; Frederick Barthelme, in Two Against One, casts a cold eye on a self-desdtructing marriage.
Kinky Friedman dropped out for a while, but it sure beat dropping dead. Now the warped warbler is back with a play, a movie deal, and murder mystery number three.
A tour of the Texas psyche, with guides like Sam Houston, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Henry Faulk; a novel of adolescence addresses carnal knowledge and fundamentalist religion.
Can a Texas publisher of technical books make a difference in the nuclear powers’ arms race? You bet.
Once, the term “paperback original” was reserved for second-rate work. Now, thanks to an innovative editor, two Texas novelists are proud to see their books in softcover.
By turning two tiny dots into two huge hippos, James Marshall made an indelible mark on children’s literature, and little people laughed happily ever after.
Dallas’ drive-in film critic Joe Bob Briggs made us laugh at bad movies. When we became the butt of the joke, it wasn’t funny anymore.
Three novelists discover that a Texas connection need not be a tie that binds.