Booked Up in 2024: What to Read from a Strong Year in Texas Letters
Some Texas nonfiction, novels, and poems to get through those long winter nights.
Books
Stories from Deep in the Heart
A new collection of Joe Holley's Native Texan columns treats subjects ranging from an Austin serial killer to a prison known as "Burnin' Hell" to a battle of porcine proportions.
Bringing Home the Story of Ben Spencer
An innocent Texan was caught for more than three decades in a web of lies and injustice.
‘Tech Doesn’t Just Stay at the Border’: Petra Molnar on Surveillance’s Long Reach
“The border is like a free-for-all, this frontier zone that is a perfect laboratory for tech experimentation.”
‘In All My Childhood Dreams, I Was a Boy’
An excerpt from "Pretty: A Memoir" by KB Brookins, a new book on coming up Black and queer in Texas
‘The Chicano Time Traveler’
Daniel Chacón's latest short story collection, The Last Philosopher in Texas, shows how fiction and superstition often mix with reality in the lives of many Chicanos.
Surviving Baptistland
A well-known warrior in the #ChurchToo movement reveals in a new book how she escaped from an abusive Texas home and an abusive Southern Baptist church.
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‘Forever Chemicals,’ Religion, and Family Tragedy in Texas
PFAS do not break down but rather persist indefinitely. It is possible that Dad drank carcinogenic water for most of his life.
Saving Lone Star Literary Life
A literary website that has connected bookish Texans since 2015 nearly closed this year. Then one of its readers saved it.
The Booksellers’ Revolt
The READER Act would have required vendors to rate books on "explicitness" before selling to schools—and blacklisted those that didn't comply.