Reviews, profiles, and interviews that capture the diverse voices adding to Texas’s rich literary tradition
Beyond Greed is the tale of the Hunts’ journey from silver spoon to silver lust. In Sing Me Back Home Merle Haggard takes a quick look at his life (too quick). Billy Clayton has Gavels, Grit & Glory--or so says his biographer.
Celebrity is Thomas Thompson’s flawed venture into fiction; The Last Texas Hero deserves a twenty-yard penalty; Peeper is to be read only to find out who the real Tom is.
In With No Fear of Failure you’ll learn how you, too, can turn rags into riches. Daddy’s Girl knows Southern discomfort. Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission is the history of our own little OPEC.
One man’s favorite writings span a century and capture Texas in all its grimness and glory.
In Painted Dresses Shelby Hearon tries to plumb the depths of love, but her characters turn out to be too shallow.
Southwest Fiction might make you think that the region is mostly metropolis and no mesquite. The Guadalupe Mountains of Texas hits a lot of high spots.
Aztec is gripping buts so gory you may have to read it with you eyes closed; Darlin’ Billadds patina to the Wild Bill Hickok legend; as a major American writer, Thomas McGuane has An Outside Chance; Louise Gluck again proves her power as a poet.
Texas writers of historical romances spice up the old boy- meets-girl plot with more than a pinch of passion.
Laura Furman handles The Glass House with a little too much care; Elmer Kelton’s novels take you way out West; a new filed guide digs into Texas’ past; Hearts will win yours.
Three Texas poets word their way into print; two new novels trace the adventures of Neanderthals and knights-errant.
In Music for Chameleons it’s hard to tell whether Truman Capote is telling the whole truth or nothing at all of the truth; Conspiracy ferrets out much of the truth about John F. Kennedy’s murder.
Michael Mewshaw reopens the case of a boyhood friend who murdered his parents’ Rober Shattuck reexamines the story of the Wild Boy.
Wallace Stegner’s love of the West and respect for its history make his works as distinctive as the region that inspired them.
Roadside Geology of Texas makes traveling a rocky road fun. In the Shining Mountains finds nature tarnished, but The Spawning Run shows it unspoiled.
Gordon Baxter’s Village Creek is just barely navigable. Amado Muro was a bohemian before it was fashionable.
John Updike’s problems are our pleasures. Mean Scrooge McDuck returns in a nostalgic comic-book collection.
A.C. Greene’s singular, exquisite vision of West Texas; a thriller that’s better than it should be; and a historical novel with too much history.
In his new book Tom Wolfe poses this question: were the Mercury astronauts men or monkeys? Thomas Thompson changes his journalistic setting from Houston to the far East to produce a book about an astonishing criminal.
Two men from Mexico inherit the legacy of all immigrants—grueling labor, low pay, and a bleak existence on the edge of the American dream.
Charles Portis’ new novel belongs to the tradition of great frontier yarns, but this time the young man goes south.
Five new books: three thrillers, one chiller, and a swan song.
Two novels with novel views of frontier days. And, Howard Hughes revisited by two reporters who leave no stone of his rocky history unturned.
A professional educator flunks the test. He asks all the wrong questions and gives the wrong answers.
Barthelme is a humane writer, but in Great Days he erased al his humans. Also, a look at two novels of the Texas hinterlands.
How a bountifully talented young Texas writer based a novel on Lyndon Johnson, won high praise, and then…
Way down up on the Suwannee River and uptown Saturday night; tracking a few Southern women.
Sleazy Holly inspires a book that is sleazier.
Emma Blue spins lovely wheels in muddy issues.
Sexual secrets in the Piney Woods.
Bobby Baker tells all and then some.
Max Apple’s oddball touches make a zany and endearing novel.
Anybody who thinks Jones, Jones & Baldwin is just a trio of small-time, small-town attorneys is headed for big-time trouble.
What happens to a mercenary when all the fighting stops?
In their hearts, these conservative writers knew they were right. Now the rest of us know it too.
The Mexican pyramids are an open book compared to Peter Tompkins’s rambling account of them.
The Oranging of America is not about the Longhorn football team taking over the government, but Max Apple’s book is only slightly less bizarre.
Being Watergate special prosecutor was hard; writing a book about it was harder.
Turn a few new leaves this holiday season.
Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake find the Limo scene semi-amusing.
Domestic bliss has seen better days than it sees in Shelby Hearon’s new novel.
Why the best years of our lives weren’t.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's latest book "The Final Days" is just too much hocus-pocus.
Start fooling around with Mother Earth and you end up getting accused of rape.
America and Texas: past and present.
Peter Passel and Rollo May help those who help themselves.
Elmer Wayne Henley is neither safe nor sorry.
Spiritual desolation in Crawford’s The Backslider; spiritual warfare in Naipaul’s Guerrillas.
T for Texas, T for Tennessee Williams’ autobiography, and T for terrible.
When a noted American humorist retired to Alpine, the joke was on him.
East Texas author William Goyen was more at home in the Fifties.
