Back of the Book

As a more-or-less-native Houstonian and longtime resident now removed from the city of bayous, I take a certain rubbernecking joy in watching my hometown’s convoluted relationship with the facts of itself. Especially as exemplified by the city’s constant struggle to establish an identity on the national stage with a series of shortlived mottos.

So is Houston Hot? Or is Houston Cool? Forbes is split on the question. Last July, the magazine bucked convention and guaranteed a lively click-bait debate when it put Houston on top of its list of “America’s Coolest Cities,” based in large part on the city’s burgeoning arts scene. Then, just last month, Forbes named Houston “America’s Next Hot Startup Town.”

The Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, not coincidentally, has launched a new “Houston is Inspired” campaign that invites visitors to “Explore the arts & culture of America’s Hottest Coolest City!” And that Hot/Cool city is not just “inspired” (because Houston contains multitudes, dontcha know), but also “hip” “tasty,” funky,” and “savvy.”

I love Houston, I’ve got no bone to pick with the application of any of those adjectives, and I’ve got increasingly decreasing patience for the jingoistic tribalism that accompanies all these eyeball-trolling listicles of Best This and Coolest That and Most Livable Whatever.

But what I love most about Houston is that no matter how many layers of packaging are applied to that town, there’s always someone resisting the reduction, poking holes in the wrapper from the inside out.

Houston arts blogger Harbeer Sandhu does just that, beautifully:

Now scroll back up to the mural called “Houston is…”  The one with the random words: inspired, hip, tasty, funky, savvy.  The one that stands at Market Square, near the convergence of Buffalo and White Oak Bayous, right above Houston’s birthplace at Allen’s Landing and the place where the Houston Police Department beat Jose Campos Torres to death before dumping his body in the bayou, yet makes NO REFERENCE TO ANYTHING TANGIBLE in favor of some abstract curlicues and a “y” shaped like a fork.  Are you shaking your head yet?  Are you knitting your brow?  If not, please check your pulse immediately, like now, seriously.

The ENTIRE POST is worth a read for its free-range take on public art, civic boosterism, and content-free arts criticism.

Enjoy. Fume. Discuss.

When Larry McMurtry agreed in 2011 to guest-judge The Texas Observer’s first short story contest, we at the magazine were thrilled: what better name to attach to a Texas-based writing competition than the man who authored Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and so many other memorable books?

What we didn’t expect was that so many people outside of Texas would match our excitement. Stories arrived from all 50 states and from Russia, Korea, Australia and Germany.

In the end, Mr. McMurtry kept the prize here in Texas, choosing McAllen’s Brian Allen Carr as the winner for his anti-cowboy myth story, “The First Henley.”

Last year a new guest judge, Heidi Durrow (author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, and winner of the 2008 Bellwether Prize for Fiction) selected Larina Lavergne’s “Water Birth” as the contest’s winner. Lavergne is a North Carolina native. As in 2011, stories came in from dozens of U.S. states and foreign countries—but the four runners-up were all Texas writers. Great writing can come from any corner of the globe, but Texans are natural-born storytellers, and our contest results reflect it.

We’re looking for more great writing this year. Short story eminence Dagoberto Gilb—no stranger to Texas letters—is judging our 2013 short story contest. The winning writer receives $1,000 and publication in our annual Books Issue and online. CLICK HERE for all the relevant information, and to SUBMIT.

Then send us your most artful fiction, your tallest tall tales, your most colorful characters, your cleverest plots, your wittiest and most touching anecdotes. Make us laugh. Make us cry. Make us proud to publish your story in our pages.

 

A few weeks ago we offered a roundup of Texas books  recently nominated for or winning major awards. As literary awards season rolls on, we have a few notices to add.

Long-listed for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award are: Observer contributor Anis Shivani, whose story collection The Fifth Lash & Other Stories we reviewed in our December issue; Steven Barthelme, author of Hush Hush, covered in January’s issue; and George Saunders, whose Tenth of December has been getting rave reviews, and who spent some time on the phone with our Emily DePrang.

Also, the winners of the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Awards were named at the organization’s annual convention over the weekend of April 6. As you probably know by now, our own Melissa del Bosque won the Edwin “Bud” Shrake Award for Short Nonfiction for her piece “The Deadliest Place in Mexico.”

Ben Fountain continues to rack up the accolades for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, winner of TIL’s Jesse H. Jones fiction prize. Steven Kellman reviewed the novel in our 2012 Books Issue; read a version of that review here.

Stephen Harrigan, whose work has been reviewed in the Observer many times, won the TIL’s Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement. We covered Harrigan’s Remember Ben Clayton in our September, 2011 issue; Harrigan’s latest essay collection, The Eye of the Mammoth, was just published by the University of Texas Press.

Finally, over at Publishers Weekly our own Brad Tyer runs down “The 10 Best Small Towns in Books,” a list that includes Nate Blakeslee’s Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, a book that grew out of  Blakeslee’s award-winning 2000 Observer piece, “The Color of Justice.”

 

Saturday April 13 is a big day for books in Texas, as Austin’s long-running Texas Book Festival expands to San Antonio for a first-ever single-day event crammed with Texas authors at two venues: San Antonio’s Central Library and the Southwest School of Art.

The schedule is too long to list here, but it includes the following authors who have been reviewed in the Observer (links go to our reviews):

Erica Greider, Lawrence Wright, Sergio Troncoso, Lynda Rutledge, Jan Reid, Andrew Porter, Domingo Martinez, Stephen Harrigan, Reyna Grande, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Maria Antonietta Berriozábal, Jay Brandon, and H.W. Brands.

Observer contributors presenting new books at the festival include Erasmo Guerra (Once More to the River), poet Laurie Ann Guerrero (A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying), and Joe Nick Patoski (The Dallas Cowboys).

And what are we reading right now? The excellent On the Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest (new from San Antonio’s Trinity University Press) by sometime Observer contributor Char Miller, who currently directs of the Environmental Analysis program at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Miller will deliver a talk at 7:30 Thursday evening at Trinity’s Holt Center, and at the festival on Saturday at 2:45.

Benjamin Alire Saenz’s story collection Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, published by El Paso’s Cinco Puntos Press, has won the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Read the Observer’s review of the book here.

Among the four runners-up for the prize was Amelia Gray’s THREATS, another book we reviewed at the Observer.

Dallas novelist Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Steven Kellman reviewed the book in the Observer’s 2012 Books Issue, a version of which you can read here.

The NBCC Nonfiction award went to Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, which former Observer managing editor Susan Smith-Richardson touched on in the same issue.

On March 19, Free Press published Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new novel Oleander Girl. Divakaruni teaches in the Creative Writing department at the University of Houston. Anis Shivani reviewed her previous novel, One Amazing Thing, for the Observer.

Kevin Smokler, UT-Austin grad and member of the SXSW advisory board, recently published Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School. Described as a “refreshing and necessary call to reading,” the book offers fresh perspectives on classics that we once considered mere homework.

Robert Flynn’s Lawful Abuse is now available in paperback from San Antonio’s Wings Press. The book is labeled “A powerful indictment of America’s abandonment of human beings, and children in particular, in favor of corporations.”

On March 26, Penguin will publish A Map of Tulsa, Benjamin Lytal’s debut novel. The book is described as “The story of Jim Praley and Adrienne Booker: from the summer they fall in love amidst the art and music scene of late 90s Tulsa, to Jim’s bracing, unexpected homecoming years later.” Lytal has late-March appearances scheduled in Austin and Houston.

(Shameless plug alert: March 26 is also the publication date of Observer managing editor Brad Tyer’s first book—Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape—on Beacon Press. Publishers Weekly has some kind prepublication words about the book here.)

And finally, UT-Austin Michener Center fellow Domenica Ruta’s memoir With Or Without You, published late last month, has been earning rave reviews. The Boston Globe calls the book “bracingly funny and poignant,” and BUST calls it “valiant and heartbreaking.” Read a profile of the writer here.