A third book in the series is scheduled for publication this fall." CANNIBALS AND "
Robert Lee Maril, a professor at Texas Southmost College, has recently written a book that explores the Texas coast and the diverse people who call it home considering the many ways Texans have altered these lands. In Cannibals and Condos: Texans and Texas along the Gulf Coast Maril talks with rich, poor, and in between to show how today's decisions will affect future lives.
For eons the Texas Gulf Coast stretched undisturbed for nearly four hundred miles of quiet wetlands and long beaches. The...

Times were tough in the thirties, and tough guys chronicled the era in newspapers, short stories, and novels in prose that was terse, hard-boiled, bleak. One such writer was a Texan named Edward Anderson.
"Rough and Rowdy Ways" is the story of Edward Anderson, primarily in what were, ironically, his golden years--the Great Depression. The laconic loner hopped freights, wrote two proletarian novels of the social underclass, looked for inspiration in a shot glass, and mixed with Hollywood celebrities while employed as a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers.
When the...

Millions have read Larry McMurtry's novel, though few conciously understand the subtle underlying themes that charachterize his fiction.

Roger Walton Jones examines McMurtry's lifelong interest in Victorian authors and their influence on his novels. Emphasizing the common sense of dislacement McMurtry shared with the Victorians, Jones identifies three Victoria themes by which McMurtry reconciles the reader to experience and gives his art a religious function: the individual's importance to society; the conflict between civilization and nature in an industrial age; and the attempt to find...

In a delicate balance between old and new, Nueva Granada presents a long personal interview that has never before been published to complement a fresh, updated selection of Robert Franklin Gish's many essays and articles about Paul Horgan and his Southwestern writings. In a career that spans seven decades, Paul Horgan's fiction and non-fiction have provided readers with an ardent regard for the lives and landscapes, history and lore of the land the Spanish explorers called Nueva Granada. As Gish revisits Horgan's work, he discovers an evolving Southwest, a land filled with diversity and new...

The American Southwest has assumed the status of a cultural icon over the last few decades, and one of the writers who helped it to do so was Erna Fergusson, named by the Hopis Beautiful Swift Fox. An Anglo American whose travel writing featured the multi-ethnicity of her region, she popularized the culture and landscapes of her native New Mexico and its surrounding states in a range of writing that prefigured the genre-defying art that has come to be called the New Journalism.Much has been written about New Mexico's remarkable Fergusson family, especially brother Harvey and his novels. But...

Even a place as big as Texas is ultimately made up of small things: a rugged mesquite shrub, a fruitless mulberry tree, a decaying neighborhood park with a polluted creek. When you place a rabbit in the shade of that mesquite, or a ring of Stars-of-Bethlehem blooming at the base of the mulberry, or some boys in the park attempting to fly a box kite, or especially when you begin to explore memories triggered by the sights and smells of these small pieces of the mighty Southwest, then you begin to find what makes Texas or any place real: stories -- James Hoggard's stock in trade. This...

Humans create culture, but in the American Southwest, argues the author of this book, the land itself has also influenced that creation. The peoples of the American Southwest share a regional consciousness that has helped to create a unified, but not homogenized, Southwestern culture.

"Fig newtons" of the imagination and of memory abound in this marvelous collection of twenty-two stories by Texas women. "Fig newtons" such as the magical moment when a dying grandmother teaches Sue Ellen to dance, the red shoes Tammy the Tupperware Princess dons in New Orleans, the yellow thread needed to put Sue Tidwell's quilt together, or weekends of escape and sisterhood spent in El Paso's McCoy Hotel.
The stories chosen here--and introduced and placed in their historical and literary context by editors Sylvia Ann Grider and Lou Halsell Rodenberger--together weave a story of their...

As Texas entered the twentieth century, it was opening a new chapter in its cultural and social life, one that would see active efforts to promote not only the appreciation of regional literature but also its creation.
Author""Betty H.""Wiesepape examines the contributions of literary societies and writers' clubs to the cultural and literary development that took place in Texas between the close of the frontier and the beginning of World War II. She offers an overview of literary club activity, as well as case studies of four individual writers' clubs that functioned in the 1920s and...

"Is literary Texas a banana republic or an empire?" Tom Pilkington has written a series of lively and delightfully learned essays addressing this question.
Pilkington traces the evolution of Texas literature from its roots (including Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the state's literary "prototype," and J. Frank Dobie, who "taught Texans how to succeed at the culture game") to its twentieth-century flowering (writers like John Graves, Rolando Hinojosa, Cormac McCarthy, and Larry McMurtry). He explores questions as diverse as who is a Texan, what makes a "Texas" writer, what distinguishes the...