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- IN THE CURRENT ISSUE »
- Boots On the Ground
- by Melissa del Bosque
- Sierra Blanca—“Y’all got here just in time. We’re going to look for a body. Are you up for it? It’s gonna get rough out there, but I can have you back by lunch.”
It’s 7 a.m. I’ve already driven two hours from El Paso with my husband, whom I’ve …
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- Features
- Author Interview »
- Inside Amigoland
- by Anis Shivani
- Oscar Casares’s short story collection Brownsville (Back Bay, 2003) was an instant hit with critics and readers, establishing Casares as a writer to watch. His follow-up, Amigoland (Little Brown, 2009),w was released in August and met with similar critical acclaim. In the novel, Don Fidencio, a ninety-one-year-old in the eponymous nursing …
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- Enterprise »
- Justice for the Dispossessed: William Wayne Justice, 1920-2009
- by Lou Dubose
- “I’ve been called a controversial judge, so I suppose I am,” William Wayne Justice told me during a courthouse interview in Austin 10 years ago. A year earlier, he had moved from Tyler, where President Lyndon Johnson had appointed him to the federal bench in 1968. As a federal district judge …
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- Departments
- EDITORIAL »
- Burning Justice
- by Dave Mann
- For decades, fire investigators walked into charred buildings in search of the same clues, the same subtle traces, that they thought indicated arson: the furniture and windows buckled by extreme heat, the burn patterns on the floor scorched by gasoline. Their methods weren’t scientific. Investigators relied on a set of assumptions—inherited …
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- POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE »
- ‘What Are You So Mad At?’
- Drew Ryun surveys the Dallas hotel conference room. He can feel the dissatisfaction—anger, even—radiating from the 40 or so newly minted conservative activists seated in front of him.
“You are all here because you are upset about something,” says Ryun, executive director of American Majority, whose mission is training …
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- JIM HIGHTOWER »
- Obama Must Get Going on Jobs
- Just before taking office, Barack Obama called on the millions of people involved in his campaign to stay active: “I don't want them to just sit around and wait for me to do something,” he said. “I want them to be pushing their agendas.”
Well, since he asked for …
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- Books & the Culture
- Reviews »
- The Oyster Is His World
- by Richard Holland
- For almost 20 years, Houstonians have learned to depend on Robb Walsh's articulate enthusiasm for food, particularly Texas food. We’re not talking fancy—Walsh writes about roadside barbecue, venerable Tex-Mex, sandwiches wrapped in greasy paper, the beautiful varieties of hot sauce and chile peppers. As the food writer for the Houston Press, …
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- Reviews »
- Becoming Brazilian
- by Ryland Barton
- The Brazilian author Clarice Lispector is not well known in the United States, but in her native land she is considered part of a Latin American vanguard that includes Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Borges. Lispector’s prose—with its open form, lyricism, and mystical metaphors—transcended narrative and meaning and suggested …
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- Reviews »
- American Ideas
- by Tom Palaima
- In April, William H. Goetzmann, a Pulitzer-prize winning historian at The University of Texas at Austin, told the Austin American-Statesman that as a boy his family had rented an apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota where John Dillinger had once lived. The enamel surface of the bathtub had spots eaten away by …
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- Reviews »
- Border Teens
- by Mary Helen Specht
- The larger publishing industry is crumbling, but “young adult” fiction appears to be holding steady, even growing. As someone who as a child read novels with “adult” content years before I was supposed to, and who as an adult can frequently be found browsing the young adult section of my public …
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- Reviews »
- Documented Immigrants
- by Emily DePrang
- Early this August, I took a Greyhound bus from Tucson to Houston and back. It was a 24-hour trip that impressed my middle-class family and friends as rugged and somewhat risky. I was proud of myself for doing it, proud, too, that I made friends with my seatmates and enjoyed chatty …
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- Excerpt »
- South Toward Home
- by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith
- In their new biography of Molly Ivins, Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith chronicle the personal and journalistic arc of Texas’ late, lamented tormentor of the right. The excerpt below recounts Ivins’ decision in 1970 to leave her first post-graduate reporting job at the Minneapolis Tribune for a co-editorship at the …
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- Reviews »
- Hollywood, Texas
- by Josh Rosenblatt
- Robert Hinkle’s career started in earnest in the spring of 1955, when the self-described “two-bit” actor from Brownfield, Texas, got a phone call from the Famous Artists Agency asking him to sit down with George Stevens, the director of Shane, A Place in the Sun, and Gunga Din. Up to that …
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