Jan Reid was a senior editor at Texas Monthly and also contributed to Esquire, GQ, Slate, Men’s Journal, Men’s Health, and the New York Times. An early article about Texas music spawned his first book, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. Among his fifteen other books are a well-reviewed novel, Deerinwater, for which he won a Dobie Paisano Fellowship; a collection of his magazine pieces, Close Calls, that was a finalist for the Carr P. Collins Award; Rio Grande, a compilation of choice writing and photography on the storied border stream; and The Bullet Meant for Me, a reflection on marriage, friendship, boxing, and his physical and emotional recovery from a shooting in Mexico. Reid also wrote an award-winning biography of Ann Richards, Let the People In. Two of his novels, Comanche Sundown and Sins of the Younger Sons, won fiction-of-the-year awards from the Texas Institute of Letters. Reid died in 2020. His last novel, The Song Leader, was published in 2021.
Though the leaders of Mexico’s revolution all lived short and violent lives, a handful of those who rode with them have survived to a ripe old age in Texas.
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.
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.
Getty Oil dropped into the market like raw steak into a bay full of sharks: Oil and Honor clarifies the waters. Beverly Lowry keeps the pages turning in her deft and racy roman à clef. The Perfect Sonya.
In Larry McMurtry’s Texasville, the teenagers from The Last Picture Show await their thirtieth high school reunion amid the hard times in Thalia and, as always, the war between the sexes.
In the novel Paradise, Donald Barthelme offers a cereal box of current events and social observations; Laura Furman challenges the dogged ideal of family in Tuxedo Park; Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass is a crash-bang publishing event.
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is more than just journalistic ghostwriting; I the Supreme is robbed of its punch; Bird of Life, Bird of Death peeks behind Central America’s dictators and dominoes.
In 1541 Coronado and his troops stumbled upon a huge canyon in the midst of grassy plains and gazed upon it with awe. Journeying down into Palo Duro Canyon on mules 443 years later, I began to understand why.
He was an aggressive cop with one of the toughest beats in Dallas. But after fourteen years and another killing, the department took him off the street and slapped him behind a desk.
Jerry Argovitz made himself unpopular with NFL management as an abrasive player’s agent. Now that he owns Houston’s new football team, he finds himself on the other side of the table—and the issues.
An Abilene man recalls the pluck and pain of his stricken son in This Is the Child. An El Paso professor creates a lovably uncool detective in Dancing Bear. An Austin meteorologist blows hot on Texas Weather.
A high school teacher shot up the First Baptist Church in the East Texas steel town of Daingerfield, and the agony lasted longer than anyone could have imagined.
Texas women write about crop dusters and frozen custard and the Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport in the encouraging new anthology Her Work. Life Sentences, though, is a flimsy feminist exercise.
Drew Pearson, Tony Hill, and Butch Johnson are wide receivers for the Dallas Cowboys—in other words, they’re artists, egomaniacs, fierce competitors, and the heart of the team.
THE GETAWAY THAT DIDN’T LASTON A COOL EVENING IN late spring, Mark Jones and Francisco Perez entered Joseph’s Foodliner, a small market in northwest San Antonio specializing in homemade egg rolls (4 for a dollar) and fresh Chinese snow peas. Young, longhaired, bearded, they had apparently charted an ambitious career
