Books
‘Black Light’ is a Weird, Wonderful Fever Dream of a Book
Sarah Bird’s Lively New Novel Resurrects a Little-Known Civil War Hero
Bird produces a memorable re-creation of a freed slave who passed as a man to become a Buffalo Soldier — and of the thoroughly racist country in which she suffered and triumphed.
You want to use phrases like “ripping yarn” and “helluva story” for Sarah Bird’s new page-turner, but that makes Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen sou...Read More
‘Presidio’ is a Beautiful, Atmospheric Texas Novel that Doesn’t Cohere
Randy Kennedy’s debut is packed — sometimes bloated — with rich characters and lovely detail that conjures small-town Texas.
Epigraphs from luminaries like John Ashbery, Clarice Lispector and Robert Smithson hint at the high-art ambitions of Randy Kennedy’s debut novel, Presidio. Th...Read More
‘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
