Books
Announcing the 2020 Insider Prize Winners
The winners were selected by guest judge Justin Torres.
This post is co-published with American Short Fiction. For the last three years, the Austin-based magazine American Short Fiction has sponsored a contest for in...Read More
‘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. The...Read More
‘After the Last Border’ Reveals the Human Cost of Trump’s Draconian Immigration Policies
A new book from Austin writer Jessica Goudeau shows that U.S. refugee resettlement policy has always shifted with the political winds of change.
In 2017, the Trump administration’s Muslim ban effectively set U.S. immigration and refugee resettlement policy back more than 100 years. Trump’s reactionar...Read More
In ‘Crooked Hallelujah,’ Kelli Jo Ford Explores How Pain is Passed Down Through Families
Ford’s debut follows the lives of a mother and daughter who move from Oklahoma to North Texas.
What makes a place home? For the women in Kelli Jo Ford’s debut novel, Crooked Hallelujah, home is a complex, contentious thing. Their homes are comforting or...Read More
In ‘Separated,’ One Journalist’s Close-up View of the Family Separation Crisis
Jacob Soboroff’s new memoir is a thorough account of how such a cruel policy came to be and how it traumatized hundreds of children and their families.
After a bitterly contested Supreme Court justice confirmation, a midterm election, the release of the Mueller Report, presidential impeachment proceedings, a gl...Read More
Lawrence Wright Embraces Pandemic Panic in ‘The End of October’
The latest novel from the Texas author proves a thriller for our times.
Just a couple of weeks ago, in the New York Times, the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk opined that the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni wrote the most realistic...Read More
Is it Time to Rethink Texas Suburbia?
Two new books lay out convincing evidence that the suburbs have been unfairly maligned and overlooked.
My opinion of the suburbs changed a few years ago on my first trip to the Katy Mills Mall, a sprawling shopping center just west of Houston. The place didn’t...Read More
What’s a Bookstore for?
Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, booksellers were facing razor-thin margins, an uncertain future, and the threat of Amazon.
The people who work in bookstores are, by and large, very brilliant. My co-workers at BookPeople, a large independent bookstore in Austin, were no exception. I ...Read More
In ‘All I Ever Wanted,’ Kathy Valentine Reclaims Her Narrative
In her new memoir, Valentine strives to show that the Go-Go’s weren’t bubbly ingenues on MTV, but women who helped define a decade of pop and punk.
The Go-Go’s were used to having their story written for them. It’s happened to any band that has weathered a press junket: the same handful of anecdotes, or...Read More
A New Book on the Sutherland Springs Shooting Explores Resilience, Forgiveness, and Grace
Long after other journalists had packed up, Joe Holley stayed in the devastated town, getting to know survivors. He tells their stories with empathy and tact.
On November 5, 2017, “a country church in the middle of nowhere,” in the words of Joe Holley, became the site of the worst mass shooting in Texas history an...Read More