In 1935 Betsy Throckmorton s father lures her from a New York job with "Time" magazine back to Claybelle, Texas, with the promise that she can be the editor of his "Claybelle"" Standard-Times." Betsy brings along her husband, Ted Winton, an easterner and Yale graduate to whom she is constantly explaining Texas. Ted will run Ben Throckmorton s radio station, KVAT, where Booty and Them Others sing in rivalry with the better known WBAP Light Crust Doughboys.
In Texas, it s the middle of the Depression and the Drought. And Prohibition is barely over, liquor still a controversy. Every city has...

Tom Lea's "The Wonderful Country" opens as mejicano pistolero Martin Bredi is returning to El Puerto El Paso] after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan warlord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro's business in Texas. Fourteen years earlier--shortly after the end of the Civil War--when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martin Bredi.
Back in Texas Brady breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man. When...

Caprock, Texas, is a sleepy cow town until oil is discovered in the 1920s. Suddenly thousands of people stream in to find their fortune; some are honest folk, but too many are two-bit swindlers. This is the story of how an entire community draws together to save itself.

Actress Pauline Terry is so successful in a performance of Chekhov's "Uncle ""Vanya" that one critic calls her "the perfect Sonya." But her life is not what she expected when she left Texas for Broadway. She swims in a fish tank in a New Jersey bar to make a living, most auditions do not result in callbacks, and her marriage is shaky.
Called home by her father's imminent death, she confronts both the past she thought she'd left behind and her uncertain future. For solace she turns to her aunt's former husband, Will Hand, a professor and nature writer. But their affair is brief and leaves...

The story of Sam Bass, both outlaw and romantic figure, has become a familiar part of Texas folklore and is well documented in nonfiction. But in this novel, Bryan Woolley creates a compelling story by giving the antihero fictional life. Woolley brings Bass alive through six alternating voices--Maude, the whore who was Bass's lover; Mary Matson, the African American who took him in and tended him as he lay dying; Dad Egan, the lawman who was once a father-figure to young Sam Bass but feels compelled to capture the outlaw; Frank Johnson, who rode with Bass but left the outlaw life to reappear...

Leonard Sanders' sweeping epic novel vividly captures the history of Fort Worth, the wild and wooly city "where the West begins," by following the fortunes of one family. The story opens when war-orphaned Travis Scurlock wanders into the new settlement on the bluff overlooking the Trinity River. Within a few years, Scurlock is a well-known trial lawyer. He marries, has a family, helps transform Fort Worth from a sleepy village to a busy commercial center, and serves as a U.S. Senator. But Scurlock has a dark side that brings complexity to these pages.
We follow generations of Scurlocks,...

Shelby Hearon's excellent twelfth novel opens, "And they lived happily ever after." It ends, "Once upon a time." The opening and closing lines echo many of the themes of the novel. The book opens with Cile Tate leaving her Presbyterian preacher husband to return to the early love of her life, Drew Williams. The fact that Cile and Drew are both married complicates things, and they have to bring four lives to endings and beginnings.
When Cile decides to leave Eben Tate, she is amazed when he announces her abandonment of him and their two daughters from his pulpit. She doesn't even have a...

From a five-time winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Novel comes a masterful tale of a restless man who was everything the West once was--and will never be again. Now a dramatic motion picture from Turner Network Television, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Sissy Spacek, and Sam Shepard.

Fort Appleby, Texas, 1952--the small West Texas mountain town to which the people of Houston, El Paso and San Antonio flee to escape the dreaded polio epidemic. And then polio hits Fort Appleby, a frightening four cases in a town of 800. School is closed, and the people spend their time fighting fear and attending funerals.
For senior football star Kevin Adams, 1952 is the year when his life is turned upside down by the epidemic and by the uncertainties that come of being seventeen and eager for all of life, from girls to football to great literature. Kevin struggles to sort out the many...

"The Second Dune," Shelby Hearon's second novel, was published in 1973 and won the Texas Institute of Letters Award as the best book of fiction of the year. Written when Hearon was forty-three and just before her divorce, the novel is seen from the point of view of suburban housewives and their mothers and daughters.
Ellen Marshall, divorced and remarried, is troubled by her son's refusal to accept her second husband, but takes great comfort from the five-year-old daughter of her second marriage. She hopes to be able to pass on to her daughter some of the knowledge that only women possess...