
What a Pulitzer Prize Winner Learned While Researching a Novel About Texas Politics
Lawrence Wright’s new book, ‘Mr. Texas,’ was inspired by what he discovered about corruption, political combat, and, yes, pig hunting.
Lawrence Wright’s new book, ‘Mr. Texas,’ was inspired by what he discovered about corruption, political combat, and, yes, pig hunting.
A new biography makes clear that the acclaimed writer had an intense love-hate relationship with his home state. Which may have been the secret to his success.
Shawn Warner was at an empty book signing for ‘Leigh Howard and the Ghosts of Simmons-Pierce Manor’ when a Fort Worth TikToker took notice. The rest is history.
Sarah Bird, Fernando A. Flores, Mary Helen Specht, Sergio Troncoso, James Wade, and six more Texas writers reflect on what McCarthy meant to them and to the state.
From a small bookstore in Central Texas, the best-selling author rules over the booming Stoicism self-help movement. Why now? Why here?
The author of Goodbye to a River and two-time National Book Award finalist helped create the magazine’s Country Notes column.
Attica Locke looks back on her 2012 essay weighing her Houston pride against the fact that “there are things about the state that just don’t work for me.”
Regarded by many Texans as a classic work of history, T. R. Fehrenbach’s ‘Lone Star’ contains racist ideas that shouldn’t be ignored.
From George Jones to Attica Locke, these Texans have made lasting cultural impacts on the state.
The coauthor of memoirs by Vanessa Lachey, Shep Rose, and Chrishell Stause spills about the glamour—and grit—of helping the famous tell their stories.
She weaves the state’s climate disasters, including droughts and floods, into terrifying tales.
Bobby Finger, host of the popular celebrity podcast ‘Who? Weekly,’ treats his subjects gently and imbues them with wit.
West Texans didn’t much appreciate Don DeLillo’s ‘End Zone’ at the time, but it elevated the lexicon of football to high art.
Disemboweled zombies, gritty female crime investigators, harrowing tales of family dysfunction—today’s crop of Texas novels has something for everyone.
The author of ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’ believes a critical mass of writers is pushing beyond the fairy tales of the past.
In his new short story collection, the Austin writer offers a fantastical view of the Texas borderlands. Just don’t call it “magical realism.”
With her stunning debut novel, ‘Perish,’ LaToya Watkins draws on her family’s deep roots in West Texas.
In Gabino Iglesias’s horror novel, racism, a broken health-care system, and Mexican cartels meet up with powerful brujas and disemboweled zombies.
In his latest novel and as president of the Texas Institute of Letters, the Ysleta-raised writer is pushing us to rethink the Lone Star literary canon.
A conversation with Chris Cander, the author of ‘A Gracious Neighbor.’
In Texas, women crime authors are finally escaping the influence of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling thriller.
The former San Antonian started writing the story that became ‘Martita, I Remember You’ thirty years ago.
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?
His stories are grotesque, disturbing, and award-winning: Meet Nacogdoches’ Joe R. Lansdale, the most twisted writer in Texas.
Indian Creek native Katherine Anne Porter is the finest author ever to come out of Texas. But only recently has her home state stopped writing her off.
Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb were the leading Texas writers and intellectuals of their age. But as ribald raconteurs, they were ahead of their time.
Our selections for some of the best contemporary Texas books.
As Sandra Scofield, Shelby Hearon, and Janet Peery are proving, you don’t have to live in Texas to be a Texas writer.
Anne Dingus has a few bones to pick with the modern mystery novel, which she says has been decomposing in recent years. Stepping up to defend the genre: none other than Texas’ queen of murder and mayhem, Mary Willis Walker.
Cormac McCarthy’s birth date and birthplace are just two of the facts about him that have eluded his rabid fans—until now. A dossier on the most fiercely private writer in Texas.
Texas is filled with giants in the science-fiction field these days, but none loom larger than Bruce Sterling and Michael Moorcock.
SUNBURNED AND HUNGRY after a day of tubing down the Guadalupe, you head back to Austin for dinner at one of your favorite Tex-Mex restaurants—a garish, festive joint called Chuy’s. You are seated and slurping on a margarita when you spot a striking man in a nearby booth. A little
I THINK I GOT interested in writing when I was in the fifth grade. I started writing short stories, and I remember wanting to get them published in the Saturday Evening Post. In high school I wrote a lot of poetry, but I wasn’t a good student; I think I
The first commandment of fiction writing is: Show, don’t tell. Rick Bass knows it well, though he still struggled through many drafts before finishing his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be (Houghton Mifflin, $25), which will be published this month. “Paint the images and trust the readers to
My literary mentor warned me not to write about my children. So why did I? Because I had to.
Except for the time she spent as a police officer in Plano and Tyler—when she couldn’t get past the “emotional shutdown” required by the job—Kim Wozencraft has always been a writer. She kept a journal as a child, as a student at Richland College in Dallas, and later, during a
Growing up in Longview and Texas City, John Lee Hancock dreamed of a life in the movies. Today, he’s one of L.A.’s hottest screenwriters.
He gave millions—and he did it in a novel way.
For fans of Mary Willis Walker, May will be the merriest of months, for that’s when the Austinite’s fourth novel will hit stores. In All the Dead Lie Down (Doubleday, $22.95), her plucky protagonist, Lone Star Monthly reporter Molly Cates, springs into action to find her father’s killer and foil
A McKinney writer’s Brit lit.
Has the best-known Latina writer of our day painted herself into a corner?
Getting published was supposed to be a cure-all, but for Austinite Louise Redd, it was just another chapter in the life of a struggling novelist.
Doing the write thing.
For El Paso physician Abraham Verghese, writing about life and death in the age of AIDS is a prescription for literary success.
The career of Austin young-adult writer Rob Thomas is going through a growth spurt.
It would be wrong to say that Bud Shrake has finished writing one third of a new novel; it’s actually an old novel, one he has been writing off and on for the past fifteen years. “It’s about love, violence, sex, and murder,” the 65-year-old Austinite explains, and is set
Poetry about a 161-year-old battle is hardly what you’d expect from a high-minded political writer, but fifth-generation Texan Michael Lind has always been a maverick.
Painful implants and alien abduction experiences may sound like science fiction, but to San Antonio writer Whitley Strieber, they’re frighteningly real.
An El Paso novelist makes history.
Some words are worth a thousand pictures; such is the case with the image-rich writing of Colum McCann, whose first novel, Songdogs (Metropolitan Books, $22.50), has won praise from both The New Yorker and the New York Times. A native of Ireland, the 31-year-old credits Texas with jump-starting his career.