Showdown at Maverick Ranch
With bulldozers poised to plow through their family’s historic spread, three San Antonio sisters are waging war against the state department.
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.
With bulldozers poised to plow through their family’s historic spread, three San Antonio sisters are waging war against the state department.
By Jan Reid
The only thing scarier than facing a great pitcher is facing a hothead like Roger Clemens.
By Jan Reid
Head for the hills: Texas has a bumper crop of bluebonnets this year.
By Jan Reid
An outsider exposes the hidden risks in Odessa’s bigger-than-life brand of football.
By Jan Reid
In early 1836, after the fall of the Alamo, a small episode in Texas history revealed an aspect of our character we’d just as soon forget.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
Yes, it’s muddy, it’s treacherous, and it smells bad enough to gag a skunk; but it’s also the only thing between us and Oklahoma.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
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 Jan Reid
Time-honored Texas rituals.
Three novelists discover that a Texas connection need not be a tie that binds.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
At first he couldn’t stand the strain of trying to get rich. Then he couldn’t stand the strain of being rich.
By Jan Reid
Walt Disney, Howard Johnson, and Margery Post Merriweather have one thing in common: they’re all trapped inside Max Apple’s new novel.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
David Lindsey stalks Houston cops, through the violence the violence and around the blood, in search of another mystery novel.
By Jan Reid
She unmasked the Klan and worried about the role of women, but she listened more to her husband than to the suffragettes.
By Jan Reid
The characters in Prize Stories and South by Southwest often dwell on the past while living out their lives in an anxious present.
By Jan Reid
Wild mustangs roam home; attorney race to Houston’s bankruptcy court; UT students get rich.
By Jan Reid
Baby Calves, children, even the agriculture commissioner: no one is safe from this tiny deamon.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
Bobby Jack Nelson—roughneck, cowhand, prospector, and Australian talk show host—is also a fine novelist; Larry L. King writes about writing.
By Jan Reid
Austin’s infamous Iguana; Lucas’ latest story; San Antonio’s dedicated Dodgers; Tascosa’s secretive spirits.
By Jan Reid
In darkest South Texas roam two of the world’s most endangered species—the black rhino and the Great White Hunter.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
Texans are sometimes driven to drink.
By Jan Reid
Football recruiting makes the NCAA see red, but SMU sees orange.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
Or, my life as a Texas gardener.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
Does Texas’ greatest college coach miss football? Nope.
By Jan Reid
Sunny in the morning, sunny in the evening, freezing by suppertime.
By Jan Reid
Four hundred Texans breed and train an uncommon kind of livestock—greyhounds.
By Jan Reid
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.
By Jan Reid
The stake is survival—for either the sheep and goat ranchers of West Texas or the smartest predator of all.
By Jan Reid
The Guadalupe River is beautiful, inviting, and treacherous.
By Jan Reid
Talk to coaches and team owners about AstroTurf and you’ll hear all its advantages. Talk to the players and you’ll hear a different story.
By Jan Reid
April is the cruelest month, and tornado-struck Wichita Falls knows why.
By Jan Reid
Do you want a rare antique muzzle-loader or a holdup pistol that can’t be traced? You can find them both at a gun show.
By Jan Reid
Fighters from all over Texas slug it out in the Golden Gloves; for most, that’s the only gold they’ll ever see.
By Jan Reid
Roger Staubach is one Cowboy who always wears a white hat.
By Jan Reid
Love beads are out at rock concerts these days.
By Jan Reid
Two self-styled Texas soldiers of fortune engineered one of the more bizarre jailbreaks in history. Here’s how it happened.
By Jan Reid
People bring their gangly quarter horse colts to Bubba Werner to transform into winners. Now and again, he does.
By Jan Reid
It takes slant-heeled boots and a strong jaw to campaign in West Texas; a Ph.D. probably doesn’t help.
By Jan Reid
Tired of running, he let himself be caught; then he busted right out again.