Books
Heartland is an Honest, Poetic Meditation on Class in America
Leaving the Gay Place Lights a Candle for the Patron Saint of Austin’s Counterculture
Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of The Gay Place author Billy Lee Brammer is part poetic ode, part oral history — and always a wild ride.
The greatest novel ever written about Austin was penned by a man from Dallas, and it did not mention the capital city by name. Still, when Billy Lee Brammer’s...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 Alam...Read More
A New History Tears Down the Myth of the Texas Rangers
Monica Muñoz Martinez’s new book paints a brutally clear picture of the Rangers’ complicity in crimes against minorities.
The popular image of the elite law-enforcement organization known as the Texas Rangers has long been derived from television fantasies and historical myth. The ...Read More
Sarah Bird’s Lively New Novel Resurrects a Little-Known Civil War Hero
Bird produces a memorable re-creation of a freed slave who passed as a man to become a Buffalo Soldier — and of the thoroughly racist country in which she suffered and triumphed.
You want to use phrases like “ripping yarn” and “helluva story” for Sarah Bird’s new page-turner, but that makes Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen sou...Read More
‘Presidio’ is a Beautiful, Atmospheric Texas Novel that Doesn’t Cohere
Randy Kennedy’s debut is packed — sometimes bloated — with rich characters and lovely detail that conjures small-town Texas.
Epigraphs from luminaries like John Ashbery, Clarice Lispector and Robert Smithson hint at the high-art ambitions of Randy Kennedy’s debut novel, Presidio. Th...Read More
‘American Hate’ Author on Hate Crimes, Free Speech and Alex Jones
Author and civil rights attorney Arjun Sethi on listening to survivors, the difficulty of prosecuting hate crimes and what the media can do better.
A mosque in Victoria, Texas, burns. Two black girls escape a deadly attack that claims the lives of two in Portland, Oregon. A Jewish family is chased out of th...Read More
‘I Can’t Date Jesus’ Chronicles Growing up Black, Queer and Catholic in Houston
Michael Arceneaux’s first book is a logical extension of the polemic, confessional style he’s perfected online.
The book begins, “Before that day, I hadn’t been to church in five Beyoncé albums.” Some people measure time in years; others, like Houston-born, Harlem-...Read More
Tinkering with the Human Heart in ‘Ticker’
Set in Houston, Mimi Swartz’s new book delivers an engrossing human drama populated with off-kilter geniuses.
Early in Mimi Swartz’s fascinating Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart, a surgeon with no good options left cuts out a sheep’s heart and...Read More
In ‘Homelands,’ Alfredo Corchado Punctures the Myth of the American Dream
At once personal and political, this nuanced book is a sober reminder that today’s immigration challenges are the result of decades of misguided American policy.
If ever there were a time to read Alfredo Corchado’s latest book, Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries, and the Fate of the Great Mexican-American Migration...Read More