Books
Octavio Solis’ ‘Retablos’ Recounts a ‘Beautiful, Messy’ Youth on the Border
‘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
Boom and Bust in Big Spring
"The Kings of Big Spring" conveys the difficulties and deprivations stared down by the Depression era's 99 percent.
Profundity alert: when a book’s subtitle contains the word “American,” never mind the phrase “American Dream,” you know you’re dealing with an autho...Read More
‘The Most Dangerous Man in America’ is a Pleasant Flashback to One of the Wildest Stories of the ’60s
In this deeply reported new book, two Texas authors interrogate the deeper meaning of Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and LSD.
I was born in 1967. The 1960s, for me and most people my age and younger, are almost purely an abstraction. I’ve familiarized myself with more than a few face...Read More
Let the Concrete Pour: ‘Power Moves’ Tracks Houston’s Bleak Transportation History
Kyle Shelton’s even-handed new history never lets the reader forget that one person’s infrastructure disappointment is another person’s happiness.
Jensen Drive, on the east side of downtown Houston, is an unlikely spot to begin a narrative. This bleak stretch of pavement crosses over a sunken Interstate 10...Read More
In ‘The Line Becomes a River,’ Plumbing the Depths of the Border War’s Human Toll
Francisco Cantú’s confessions mimic the desert landscape he patrols: haunting but elegant, with glimmers of humor for reprieve.
It’s Christmas Eve, and Francisco Cantú and his mother are drinking eggnog with brandy around a miniature tree. Mom, a retired National Park Service ranger, ...Read More
Tracking a Deadly Cat on the Texas Frontier in ‘The Which Way Tree’
While the frontier Texas subgenre has its limitations, Elizabeth Crook’s new novel is an enduring adventure tale.
Elizabeth Crook’s latest foray into the labyrinths of family and history in Texas is an absorbing coming-of-age adventure set in post-Civil War chaos, a time ...Read More
10 Texas Books We Loved in 2017
Get thee to a bookstore.
Of the hundreds of review copies that land in our mailbox every year, only a few dozen books will end up getting the Observer treatment. The criteria for review...Read More