Books
A Strange and Wonderful New Book Celebrates the Often-Ignored Work of Outsider Artists
Troubled Waters: New Book Plunges into Texas’ Convoluted Water Law
Seamus McGraw's reporting tour de force goes beyond policy and history by trying to understand the perverse incentives that drive decision-making.
In 2009, the Williams family began an almost decade-long battle over whether the water beneath their land is theirs to do with as they please. Claytie and Jeff ...Read More
How a Texas Author Learned to Love Cockroaches (and Other Tales of Off-Putting Creatures)
Clinton Crockett Peters’ fondness for unpopular species may well temper some of our deepest prejudices.
For Clinton Crockett Peters, the first formative experience with wildlife would strike at a young age. Six years old and living briefly on North Padre Island, h...Read More
Jorge Ramos’ New Book, ‘Stranger,’ is a Journalist’s Manifesto
"We have to be on the opposite side of power, regardless of who is in the White House, a Democrat or a Republican.”
When Mexican-American journalist Jorge Ramos went mano a mano against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in an Iowa press conference in 2015, he didn’t ...Read More
On Giant’s Shoulders: New Cinema History Dissects Texas Tropes
"Giant" was meant to confront certain ugly implications about Texas, chiefly that it is perpetually big, bigoted and booming.
In 1956, America was ascendant, and Texas was America. Eleven years after the end of World War II, the greasy machinery of capitalism had conquered the country ...Read More
In ‘God Save Texas,’ Lawrence Wright Explains the Lone Star State to Outsiders
The latest entry in the ever-popular explaining-Texas genre, “God Save Texas” is a rambling, impressionistic record of ambivalence.
In 1845, when the United States was hotly debating the imminent annexation of Texas and the prospect of a war with Mexico, Abraham Lincoln wrote to a constituen...Read More
‘The Natural History of Texas’ Celebrates the State’s Lesser-Known Critters and In-Between Places
At first glance, the book appears to be a textbook. But it soon transforms into a welcome collection of oddities, a bestiary of the strange, unexpected and overlooked.
On December 7, 1941, two events coincided in a wholly unpredictable way. That the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor is household knowledge. Less well known is that...Read More
‘The Red Caddy’ Is Charles Bowden’s Pithy, Witty Posthumous Tribute to Edward Abbey
Bowden and Abbey were both fearless, larger-than-life types with a taste for tequila, an eye for women and a big problem with authority.
Charles Bowden was a notorious walker-outer. Obituaries of the celebrated writer, who died in 2014, often note that he walked out of his own dissertation defens...Read More
Houston Poet Analicia Sotelo’s Debut Smashes Latino Stereotypes
Sotelo’s incisive and descriptive poems take readers across Texas to interracial weddings, modern cities, dinner parties and mother-daughter conversations.
Larry McMurtry once concluded that nearly all of Texas literature was minor and sentimentalist. Writers like J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb mourned a...Read More
‘BANG’ Offers a Dark Look at the Human Cost of Mexico’s Drug War
Daniel Peña is not sparing in his assessment of Texas, where farmworkers are poisoned by fertilizer and pesticide, and Mexico, where guessing who will be next to die in the drug wars has become a lottery game.
Daniel Peña’s debut novel reminds me of a bantamweight boxer. Lean and compact, it is packed with energy, ready to land blow after punch after jab on any rea...Read More