During the winter of 1896, two men, Charles MacFarland, Texas cattleman, and Charles C. French, public relations director for the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company, met on a sidewalk in North Fort Worth. In the course of their conversation they agreed that a stock show would do a great deal to stimulate the livestock industry and to draw attention to Fort Worth's place in it.
On a crisp winter morning in 1993, two men met on a sidewalk in West Fort Worth. Both were professional stockmen. They spoke entirely different languages, one Portuguese, the other a highly inflected brand of English....

During the winter of 1896, two men, Charles MacFarland, Texas cattleman, and Charles C. French, public relations director for the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company, met on a sidewalk in North Fort Worth. In the course of their conversation they agreed that a stock show would do a great deal to stimulate the livestock industry and to draw attention to Fort Worth's place in it.
On a crisp winter morning in 1993, two men met on a sidewalk in West Fort Worth. Both were professional stockmen. They spoke entirely different languages, one Portuguese, the other a highly inflected brand of English....

Fleeing Atlanta and an emotionally abusive marriage, Imogene McBride is heading west with her precocious, beautiful teenage daughter, Cora, when their car breaks down in the tiny North Texas town of Agatite. While her mother sits out its repair on a bench on the courthouse lawn, Cora wanders off to buy ice cream, enters a drugstore and disappears without a trace. Initially, believing Cora is playing a prank, an agitated Imma storms the drugstore and then the sheriff s office demanding answers. When answers don t come, she returns to the park bench to wait, her annoyance turning to fear, and...

Sandhill County Clay Reynolds s Yoknapatawpha is the setting for all nine stories in this collection. Reynolds sees his stories as reflective fragments, the kind one notices when driving through a county in North Central Texas old buildings and houses, each one concealing a story. I wonder about such places, who may have built them and what they looked like new. I think also about newer places, or places that have been converted from one thing to another, and I wonder about the people behind the windows and doors, what their stories truly are. Sometimes a sensation that wouldn't cause so much...

In the caveat to this irreverent and hilarious satire, Clay Reynolds writes, "No poet writing today could be this lucky, this tragic, this infamous. Indeed, it wouldn't be tolerated." No, one will have to admit, it wouldn't. Offered in the same vein as Jane Smiley's "Moo" and Richard Russo's Straight Man, Reynolds's "Ars Poetica" explores the life of a modern-day Don Juan, a hedonistically ambitious poetaster of our own times, a self-styled Lothario, but, as the tragicomedy ultimately reveals, a man who ultimately discovers that he has more in common with Coleridge's mariner than with any...

A nameless and sometimes hapless narrator moves through a series of casual encounters, mostly in the Southwest, with total strangers, average people going about day-to-day, often mundane activities, but taking time to reveal to him, unprompted, their life experiences.Although he does not invite their attention, they sometimes seem desperate to share their stories with him, mostly because he's right there, sometimes trapped by circumstance. Often funny, sometimes sad, always poignant in a way, their voices, their words open up their deeper selves, reveal both the comedy and tragedy of...