Michael Schaub
A New Short-Story Collection Imagines a Texas Town’s Secession
‘A Saint From Texas’ Gets the Lone Star State Right
Edmund White chronicles the coming-of-age stories of two Texas sisters in a vivid new novel.
When we first meet Yvonne and Yvette, the twin sisters at the heart of Edmund White’s A Saint From Texas, they seem straight out of The Last Picture Show. They’re growing up in the 1950s in the fading oil town … Read More
In ‘Barn 8,’ an Unsparing Look at the Industrial Chicken Industry
Deb Olin Unferth’s darkly comic novel imagines a chicken heist gone wrong—and takes on the factory farming industry.
The average American eats about 279 eggs each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and that’s no surprise. Eggs are cheap and available everywhere, and sandwiches featuring them are a staple of fast-food restaurant value menus. They also … Read More
In This Twisted Coming-of-Age Tale, the Monsters in the Closet Are Real
Set in a creepier version of North Texas, Shaun Hamill's debut novel is equal parts beautiful and terrifying.
“My family is spectacularly bad at endings,” admits Noah Turner, the narrator of Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters. “We never handle them with grace. But we’re not great with beginnings, either.” This, it turns out, is a bit of … Read More
Beasts of the Border
Fernando A. Flores’ debut novel paints a vivid, if cynical, portrait of life on the U.S.-Mexico border.
It’s the near future in South Texas, and things haven’t gotten any better. A global food shortage has killed 20 percent of the world’s population and spawned riots in American cities. The legalization of drugs has failed to stop the … Read More
‘Trinity’ Offers a Beautifully Fragmented Portrait of the Inventor of the Nuclear Bomb
Hall paints a portrait of Oppenheimer through refraction, resulting in a novel that captures his life fully, but indirectly.
It’s been more than 73 years since the first nuclear bomb the world had ever seen exploded in the New Mexico desert. That bomb was the product of the Los Alamos National Laboratory under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, … Read More
The Observer Review: James Presley’s The Phantom Killer
The Texarkana Moonlight Murders, a 1946 series of slayings, shootings and beatings in and near the Texas-Arkansas border city, were committed by a "Phantom Killer” who was never caught. Author James Presley thinks he's identified the culprit. Read More
Michelle Theall’s Memoir Tracks Faith, Family, and Homophobia in Texas
Moral and spiritual courage, along with straightforward, unpretentious prose, make Teaching the Cat to Sit an eloquent, entertaining, and deeply brave memoir. Read More