Culture
Loon Star: Gun Crazy
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 grac...Read More
Attica Locke’s New Mystery Novel Unearths East Texas Secrets
Heaven, My Home explores how black and white people can live almost entirely different experiences inside the same time and place.
Attica Locke’s 2017 detective novel, Bluebird, Bluebird, featuring Texas Ranger Darren Matthews, was a popular and critical success. Now, in the sequel Heaven...Read More
The Large Ask
Naomi Klein concedes in her new book that fighting climate change will be expensive and disruptive. She also passionately argues that it remains our most necessary battle.
Look I understand too little too late I realize there are things you say and do You can never take back But what would you be if you didn’t even try You h...Read More
How Earl Campbell Changed Football in Texas
In Earl Campbell: Yards After Contact, a new biography of the famed player, Asher Price writes, “Earl Campbell tried, through carrying the football, to transcend race.”
In 1977, the University of Texas’ crushing running back, Earl Campbell, racked up 1,744 yards on the football field, 1,054 of those coming after initial cont...Read More
Ken Burns’ New Documentary Builds a Bigger Tent for Country Music
Co-opted by whites, country music was largely shaped by black and immigrant musicians.
As a filmmaker, Ken Burns sees himself as a uniter and not a divider—an admirable endeavor in these polarized times, but not always a successful one. His 2017...Read More
American Health Care is Broken, Especially in Texas. What Can We Do About It?
Physician Marty Makary’s new book shows how sky-high medical bills can ruin patients’ lives—but puts the burden on individuals to demand change.
Add yet another first place health care ranking no one wants for Texas: We have the highest hospital bills in the country. A new study has found that Texas pr...Read More
‘Owned’ Explores the Racist Foundation of Homeownership in America
Giorgio Angelini, the film’s director and a native Houstonian, discusses the movie ahead of a showing in Austin on September 10.
After Giorgio Angelini graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005, he toured the country with his two bands, playing in the same bars and clubs ye...Read More
The Highwomen Are the Superbly Talented, Feminist Supergroup Country Music Needs
On a stunning self-titled album released this week, the four musicians—two of whom are Texans—explore domesticity, motherhood, love, and loss.
In 1973, fresh from recording her raw, woman-to-woman plea to spare her relationship, Dolly Parton mixed “Jolene” in Nashville’s RCA Studio A. She wouldn...Read More
‘The Secrets We Kept’ is a Finely-Structured Story of Secrets, Spies, and Secretaries
Lara Prescott’s sparkling debut novel is based on one of the Cold War’s strangest stories: a covert operation to spread a banned book across the Soviet Union.
When I taught American literature at a Soviet university in 1980, I managed to bring along some books that were banned by the Kremlin: Catch-22, One Flew Over t...Read More
