Set in Texas, The Gay Place consists of three interlocking novels, each with a different protagonist--a member of the state legislature, the state's junior senator, and the governor's press secretary. The governor himself, Arthur Fenstemaker, a master politician, infinitely canny and seductive, remains the dominant figure throughout.

Billy Lee Brammer--who served on Lyndon Johnson's staff--gives us here "the excitement of a political carnival: the sideshows, the freaks, and the ghoulish comedy atmosphere" (Saturday Review).

Originally published in...

Praise for KINGS OF TEXAS
""Kings of Texas is a fresh and very welcome history of the great King Ranch. It's concise but thorough, crisply written, meticulous, and very readable. It should find a wide audience.""
-Larry McMurtry, author of Sin Killer and the Pulitzer Prize--winning Lonesome Dove
""This book is about the King Ranch, but it is about much more than that. A compelling chronicle of war, peace, love, betrayal, birth, and death in the region where the Texas-Mexico border blurs in the haze of the Wild Horse Desert, it is also an intriguing detective story with links to the...

A sampling of Texas literature and movies in pieces.

From the earliest days of film, Texas and its colorful history offered promising story lines comprised of heroes, images, lore, and legend that filmmakers could return to again and again. And so they did in films about the Alamo, the Texas Rangers, the ubiquitous cowboy and the trail drives, big ranchers, and bigger wildcatters. With the advent of the Talkies, Texas movies continued to be a staple of Hollywood backlot productions, mainly in the form of B Westerns.

In the golden age of Texas cinema--dating from the end of World War II to the assassination of JFK--the Western continued to...

These Texas stories are among the best produced by the state's writers in the mid-twentieth century. Selected above all for their artistic excellence and their narrative mastery, they also present a vital picture of the Southwest in microcosm, as revealed in its largest state.

Texas and Texas writing moved from a Southern orientation in the 1940s--reflected here in works by William Goyen, William Humphrey, and others--to the strong Southwestern flavor of stories by such authors as Larry McMurtry and A. C. Greene to, finally, urban or Sunbelt Texas, mirrored in the edgy, sometimes...