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.
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.”
Disemboweled zombies, gritty female crime investigators, harrowing tales of family dysfunction—today’s crop of Texas novels has something for everyone.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
