Books
American Cities Weren’t Revitalized by the White ‘Creative Class.’ Immigrants Made Them Great.
Short Story Finalist: ‘The After Party’
In Jess Smith’s tense and troubling story, a wedding party turns dark.
Fernando A. Flores, guest judge for our 2019 short story contest, says his favorite stories are those that “take some kind of risk, strive for something great...Read More
‘Big Wonderful Thing’ Valianty Fits Much of Texas History Into a Single Book
Stephen Harrigan forgoes a sweeping narrative and instead opts for finely etched anecdotes to explain the state’s epic history.
Alaska leads in area, California in population, but Texas surpasses all other states in swagger, strut, and self-regard. This (partly) explains why the catalo...Read More
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
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
‘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
‘The Weil Conjectures’ Rewards the Intellectually Adventurous
Part biography, part memoir, Karen Olsson’s new book traces the extraordinary lives of a famous mathematician and his philosopher sister.
The Latin root of the word conjecture, conicere, means to throw things together. Think of Jackson Pollock splashing different paints onto a canvas and hoping fo...Read More
