Walter Prescott Webb.

Books

Reviews, profiles, and interviews that capture the diverse voices adding to Texas’s rich literary tradition

Books|
September 12, 2014

The Hard Stuff

An exclusive excerpt from Domingo Martinez’s new memoir, “My Heart Is a Drunken Compass,” in which a drink is always close at hand and the battle against the bottle is never fully won.

Books|
August 5, 2014

Dallas Flambé

With its tight prose, waitress heroine, and stinging insight into urban life, Merritt Tierce’s debut marks an exciting turn in Texas literature.

Books|
June 5, 2014

Race and Relations

Journalist Chris Tomlinson delves into the parallel histories of two Texas families with the same last name—one black, one white.

Books|
April 8, 2014

The Rough Guide to Frackistan

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should rank alongside the smartphone as this young century’s most transformative technology. Over the past decade, so much oil and gas has been unlocked from previously impervious rock that America’s generation-long energy crisis has all but ended. Instead of a crippling strategic vulnerability—dependence on foreign

Books|
January 22, 2014

Bexar County’s Library on a Cloud

BiblioTech, one of the country's first all-digital public libraries, aims to reach more readers by hosting their entire collection on the cloud. Patrons may choose from 18,000 digital titles and can check out Kindles, too.

Books|
June 3, 2013

Carrying on Chris Kyle’s Legacy

The Navy SEAL sniper was killed at a gun range in Erath County before he completed his second book, "American Gun." Now his wife and co-authors are determined to share the story they knew Kyle wanted to tell.

Books|
May 24, 2013

Hog Hunting With Texas’s Next Literary Giant

Philipp Meyer is impressing the literary world with his second novel, The Son, a multigenerational epic about an oil and ranching dynasty in Texas that is being called the most ambitious Texas novel in years. But how did this East Coast-reared man manage to capture the spirit of the state?

Books|
May 13, 2013

Big Little Man

“By the time I’d been with the band a year, I was treated the same as any other Comanche.” An excerpt from Philipp Meyer’s epic new novel, “The Son.”

Books|
January 24, 2013

The Artist and the City

For thirty years, when she wasn’t writing books or winning genius grants, Sandra Cisneros has been pushing and prodding San Antonio to become a more sophisticated (and more Mexican) city. Now she’s leaving town. did she succeed?

News & Politics|
January 21, 2013

The Last Liberal

As Jan Reid's new biography makes clear, Ann Richards was one of the most magnetic politicians of the past thirty years. So why didn’t she leave much of a legacy?

Books|
January 21, 2013

The Writes of Spring

Robert Caro on LBJ. Marcus Luttrell on war. Douglas Brinkley on Walter Cronkite. James Donovan on the Alamo. Steve Coll on ExxonMobil. Ben Fountain on a surreal Dallas Cowboys halftime show. Dan Rather and Sissy Spacek on themselves. For some reason, May has turned out to be a month like

Book Review|
January 21, 2013

Exxposé

What lies beneath the hood of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company?

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