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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE GLEN ROCK BOOK OF THE DEAD is a quiet tour de force from former Austinite MARION WINIK, who ruminates on the meaning and messages to be culled […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The stereotypical image of America's middle class--successful adults shepherding worthy children toward better lives--is turned on its head in ANDREW PORTER'S beautifully executed short story collection THE THEORY […]

With his twenty-second book, Traitor to His Class, the acclaimed historian and University of Texas at Austin professor brings yet another political giant into focus: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Do you […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One can almost smell the patchouli wafting off the pages of NINE KINDS OF NAKED, a neopsychedelic satire from recently transplanted Austinite TONY VIGORITO. Channeling the spirited humor […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] San Antonio resident DAVID LISS dives headlong into the capital of post-Revolutionary America--Philadelphia circa 1792--and emerges with a pearl of a thriller in THE WHISKEY REBELS. It's a […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Life has taken some interesting turns for DIANE WILSON, whose metamorphosis from shrimp boat captain to environmental activist was documented in Texas Gold, a multiple-award-winning documentary based on […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2692 Martha Carrier was arrested, tried, and hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, for having committed "sundry acts of witchcraft." Ten generations on, her Dallas-based descendant KATHLEEN KENT has […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Longtime followers of BOB SCHIEFFER, the chief Washington correspondent for CBS, will hear his silky rasp echo in their heads as they thumb through BOB SCHIEFFER'S AMERICA, a […]

The New York Times named the author's first novel, Prep, one of 2005's ten best books; its successor, The Man of My Dreams, was a national best-seller. Her newest, American […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over the course of two decades living in Montana's remote Yaak Valley, Houstonbred RICK BASS has produced 21 books-largely about the wilderness that surrounds him--and acquired a reputation […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Life is kicking Pulitzer-nominated journalist Cason Statler squarely in the pants at the outset of JOE R. LANSDALE'S potent seriocomic thriller LEA THER MAIDEN. Fired by his editor […]

It took the San Antonio resident thirty years to write the memoir Golden Bones-a reasonable time, perhaps, to assess a life that includes an escape from Cambodia's killing fields and […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] More than forty years into his career as an antiquarian bookseller (not to mention his other job as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist), LARRY MCMURTRY has paused to reflect […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The real-world town of Colma, California--home to about 1,600 residents and more than two million corpses in seventeen cemeteries (motto: "It's great to be alive in Colma")--provides an […]

A decade of research by this University of Texas at Austin psychology prof has led to new ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and the spaces they inhabit, as […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As the father of the golf novel (exhibit A: Dead Solid Perfect, circa 1974), Fort Worth's DAN JENKINS holds license in perpetuity to exercise the genre's cliches, which […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] San Antonio-born journalist MARIE BRENNER borrowed her memoir's title, APPLES AND ORANGES: MY BROTHER AND ME, LOST AND FOUND, from the childhood nickname given to her and her […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] HOW PERFECT IS THAT marks SARAH BIRD'S return to the madcap plotting that was her stylistic calling card in late-eighties novels like The Boyfriend School It's an entertaining […]

Word is that BEN REHDER might drop the curtain on his snarky Blanco County mystery series with HOLY MOLY. The sixth novel featuring square-jawed Johnson City game warden John Marlin. […]

Just ten pages into THE TRIUMPH OF CAESAR, I had learned more Roman history from STEVEN SAYLOR than from all my high school and college professors combined. "Haruspicy was the […]

The best-selling Houston-based writer sets her new novel, The Palace of Illusions, in the fifth millennium BCE. Based on India's epic Mahabharat poem, it examines love and war from the […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK is a talent. Though his debut novel, THE STORY OF FORGETTING, sings a bit from the Jonathan Safran Foer hymnal (a precocious teen trying to […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The first time nine-year-old Booger Red got drunk on beer, he decided, "I had already fucked up more ways than God was going to put up with ... […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Meet Sonny Bravo, the sweet but surly almost-six-teen-year-old who shrugs his way through THE FLOWERS, Austinite DAGOBERTO GILB'S first novel since 1994's The Last Known Residence of Micky […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We'll take ROBERT LELEUX at his word when he declares in THE MEMOIRS OF A BEAUTIFUL BOY that, growing up in tiny Petunia, he didn't know he was […]

This boisterous bookseller runs a Jefferson hair salon/bookstore, Beauty and the Book, that is a bastion of independent literary thinking-and egalitarian fun. She shares her Texas joie de vivre in […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Austinite TITO RAJARSHI MUKHOPADHYAY became a poster boy for the learning potential of autistic children with his first book, The Mind Tree, a collection of stories and poems […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] History buffs will know sixteenth-century Spaniard Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca as one of the first Europeans to explore Texas, but even they will find surprises in A […]

The Round Rock author and former video game designer has just penned his ninth Star Wars serialization, Legacy of the Force: Fury. What cachet does your role in the Star […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There is something irresistibly civilized about the STEVE MARTIN who abandoned live comedy to ply his trade as a writer, first as a playwright (1993's Picasso at the […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At the three-quarter mark of PAUL DRUMMOND'S exhaustive (and exhaustingly detailed) band bio, EYE MIND: THE SAGA OF ROKY ERICKSON AND THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS, THE PIONEERS OF […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Inspired by the popularity of a panel on Texas crime literature hosted by the Southwestern Writers Collection in 2004, editors Bill Cunningham, Steven L. Davis, and Rollo K. […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] EDWIN "BUD" SHRAKE'S picaresque CUSTER'S BROTHER'S HORSE makes fine fodder of the bad blood in Texas following the Civil War, circa 1865. Federal troops visit indignities on the […]

The colorful Midland oilman, profiled by journalist Mike Cochran in Claytie: The Roller-Coaster Life of a Texas Wildcatter, has made and lost fortunes, but he is best known for his […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Texas-raised news anchor JIM LEHRER is too much the gentleman to author a full-blown satire, but he's not above a genial send-up of middling America--the Midwest, the middle […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Expectations run low for a river-paddling diary named after a popular (though decidedly watery) Mexican cerveza, which accounts in part for the pleasure of discovering THE TECATE JOURNALS: […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Themes of family and loyalty provide a nice counterbalance to the gruesome violence (wood chipper, anyone?) in THE LAST JEW STANDING, the fourth excellent offering from lit noir […]

By design, there are no stunning revelations to be gleaned from FOLLOW THE MONEY: HOW GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE TEXAS REPUBLICANS HOG-TIED AMERICA. Texas journalist JOHN ANDERSON does not […]

Vietnam. Thirty-plus years after helicopter airlifts signaled the fall of Saigon, the name still evokes ghastly images of napalm-scorched children and ad hoc executions by handgun. DENIS JOHNSON, author of […]

"I think/i am going to die tonight./and something inside me/looks forward to it./and something inside me/is twisting my intestines around,/trying to make letters out of them,/ trying to spell the […]

The Austin journalist and linguistics expert ponders the nature of speech imperfections and what verbal gaffes reveal, or don't, in Um ... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They […]

In a case of coincidental plot devices, two of Texas's favorite fictional gumshoes recently swore off the detecting business because of an unfortunate tendency to call clown death on their […]

In PEPPERFISH KEYS, the fourth in Austinite DARRYL WIMBERLEY'S mystery series, Detective Barrett "Bear" Raines--a black cop on Florida's racially charged Redneck Riviera--struggles to tell the good guys from the […]

In the sixties, at London's Ealing Art College, a student named Pete Townshend was introduced by his Alabama-born classmate, Tom Wright, to both mind-altering substances and American rhythm and blues. […]

Belying its subtitle, JOE M. O'CONNELL's fiction debut, EVACUATION PLAN: A NOVEL FROM THE HOSPICE, has surprisingly little to say about death. Not that anyone at this unnamed Austin hospice […]

MARSHA MOYER'S whip-smart storytelling elevates the amiable chick lit of her third Lucy Hatch book, HEARTBREAK TOWN, well above the genre. When we last saw Lucy, she and singer-songwriter husband […]

If genius truly skips a generation, what becomes of the moderately stellar offspring of brilliant parents?In his wry and affecting THE BEAUTIFUL MISCELLANEOUS, Austinite DOMINIC SMITH probes the fate of […]

The Price clan, of Austin's well-heeled West Lake Hills neighborhood, inhabits ERIC B. MARTIN'S third novel, THE VIRGIN'S GUIDE TO MEXICO, as a less than holy family. Truitt, a prosperous […]

Born on the Five Wells Ranch, in Andrews County, this consummate Texas writer has authored almost fifty books and been voted the greatest western writer of all time by his […]

San Antonio's PAULETTE JILES combines telling period detail and credible characters to evoke Depression-era Texas in her terrific second novel, STORMY WEATHER. The Stoddard women--mother Elizabeth and daughters Jeanine, Mayme, […]