Books
The Texas Observer’s Best Features of 2018
‘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
Announcing the Eighth Annual Observer Short Story Contest
Send us your stories, writers!
In “Muriel,” Wendy Lerner Lym’s 2017 Texas Observer Short Story Contest prize-winning story, the narrator spends full days watching YouTube videos and the...Read More
A Vampire Book That Does Not Suck
Written in the style of an oral history, Raymond A. Villareal’s novel quaffs greedily from the arteries of its literary antecedents.
In the border town of Nogales, Arizona, the body of a 28-year-old woman with unusual bruising has gone missing. The coroner’s office staff thinks it might be ...Read More
A Strange and Wonderful New Book Celebrates the Often-Ignored Work of Outsider Artists
The 11 short biographies included in the book — largely tales of suffering, redemption and mystery — are told with great sensitivity and warmth.
In 1967, more than 40 years after his death, Charles Dellschau’s belongings were finally piled out on the street in front of his former house in Houston. An a...Read More
‘Driven’ is an Edgy Memoir of Cars, Crises and Coming of Age
Melissa Stephenson’s new book exploits the bread and butter of memoir — parsing childhood experiences and complicated family dynamics — but also explores more experimental terrain.
In the crowded field of memoir, it’s the elevator pitch that sells copies, and this book certainly has one: a brother’s tragic suicide nestled within a narr...Read More
A Feminist Literary Classic Gets a Timely Reissue, and it’s Still Maddeningly Relevant
How many times do women have to write this book before someone takes us seriously?
Nearly four decades after she penned it, Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing has just been reissued by the University of Texas Press, and it’s as...Read More