Articles

Albert S. Broussard teaches history at Texas A&M. His books include Expectations of Equality: A History of Black Westerners and Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954.

Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

I recommend Eric Foner's Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, published in 2015 by W. W. Norton. Eric Foner demonstrates why he is widely regarded as one of the leading American historians of my generation, as he reconstructs slave society in New York, the home of the nation's largest free African American community. Following a tip from a former graduate student, Foner draws liberally upon the detailed accounts of Sydney Howard Gay, who emerged as one of the key organizers of New York's Underground Railroad. His moving account illuminates how New York's free blacks worked with both white and black abolitionists to assist runaway slaves and to undermine an institution that is universally regarded today as inhumane. Along the way, Foner exposes his readers to a fascinating cast of characters who risked their safety and prison terms to right a morally bankrupt system of forced labor.

Sarah Cortez's books include Cold Blue Steel, Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance, and Walking Home: Growing Up Hispanic in Houston.

Mark Doty, Deep Lane: Poems

Mark Doty is that remarkable breed of writer who generates volume after volume of stunning prose and poetry both. His latest title, Deep Lane, will appeal to all writers due to its careful attention to diction and its insights into the mysterious borealis of the human condition we all must contend with.

Nan Cuba, professor and author of Body and Bread, is the founder of Gemini Ink in San Antonio.

Joan Silber, Fools: Stories

Fools is a collection of stories connected by reappearing characters and their associations with anarchy. Each story captures the essence of a lifetime, scooting through time yet accomplishing a novel's reach, demonstrating how our choices define us. A man of questionable morals finally articulates what he's learned. A woman rejects her anarchist youth, unable to appreciate her friend, Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Fools was longlisted for the National Book Award and should have won it.

Tracy Dahlby teaches journalism at UT Austin and is the author of Into the Field: A Foreign Correspondent's Notebook and Allah's Torch: A Report from Behind the Scenes in Asia's War on Terror.

Thomas McGuane, Crow Fair: Stories

Foreign correspondents of a certain age notoriously teethed on the works of Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, and so discovering other masters of the short story has, for me, been both a career-long joy and a sort of busman's holiday from deadlines. One big regret is that I didn't start reading Thomas McGuane until I dipped into his new collection of Montana-centric stories some weeks ago. I can't remember reading an author more adept at limning man's (as in men's) unerring capacity for outsmarting himself in shrewd ploys that backfire with such abrupt, joke's-on-you twists—turnabouts that reveal the pathos that's been percolating under the surfaces of mordant humor all along. "What kind of idiot puts a casserole in a lunch pail?" asks the sclerotic husband of "The Casserole," after he learns his wife of twenty-five years is leaving him to stay on at her parents' ranch and his mother-in-law hands him a heavy meal for the long drive home.

Ron Rash, Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories

Then there are the fine, laconic stories of Ron Rash. This latest volume is a sort of greatest-hits compilation, and typically the stories sparkle with clean, elegant sentences that cast light on the dark edges of life in Rash's Appalachia. Very impressive is the author's gift for time travel—in one story he'll be writing about the wages of the Civil War; in another, about characters today caught up in rural America's crystal meth epidemic. In a favorite, "Hard Times," about life on a hardscrabble, Depression-era farm, the luckless farmer shows mercy to a thief but doesn't dare tell his sullen wife as he climbs into bed next to her. "Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn't be found, shacks where families lived who didn't even have one swaybacked milk cow. . . . He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was."

Edna O'Brien, The Love Object: Selected Stories

What talk of short stories would be complete without the touch of an Irish master? And, as luck would have it, Edna O'Brien has come out with new collection, too. I'm enjoying it very much. In "A Scandalous Woman," O'Brien skewers the pecking order and baked-in attitudes toward women in "a land," she writes, "of strange sacrificial women." Her sentences bristle, stylishly, with a sense of outrage at the sin of injustice and the injustice of (the allocation of) sin, in a lush, descriptive tongue. There's the posture of a vulpine swain waiting for his lover, "his face forward, his head almost as low as the handlebars of the bicycle, and he surveyed us carefully as we approached." And the young bride who, after her shotgun wedding, looks to make her escape: "When they came to leave Eily tried to dart into the back of the car . . . just like an animal trying to get back to its lair." In short, it's poignant, beautiful stuff that unwinds at a stately pace.

Carrie Fountain is an Austin poet whose collections include Instant Winner and Burn Lake.

Antonya Nelson, Funny Once: Stories

When I was the lowliest of undergraduate misfits at New Mexico State University, secretly writing poems and stories while impersonating a theater major, I'd sometimes see Antoyna Nelson at my father's bar, where I was a (terrible) cocktail waitress and where she, a titan of the creative writing department, would sometimes come after workshop with her graduate students. One night, standing beside me behind the bar, my dad shoved me. "Why are you staring at that woman?" he asked.

"I want to be her when I grow up," I answered.

I've been devouring Nelson's stories and novels since I was nineteen and my feelings about her writing have only increased. She is a writer of such immense talent she makes it look effortless, rendering the knottiest, most absurd truths about the strange experience of living in a way that is at once very funny and very painful. It's a winning combo. I've long heard Nelson called "the Chekhov of the red states." I didn't quite understand this analogy until recently, when I became more familiar with Chekhov. I thought, Yes. I get it. But for me Chekhov was the Nelson of Russian literature. 

If you've never read Antonya Nelson before, start with this book. It's as good as it gets. Your path to hero worship begins with Funny Once.

S. C. Gwynne's books include Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson and Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.

Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

I strongly recommend Hampton Sides' In the Kingdom of Ice. It is just a brilliant narrative about arctic exploration that reads like a thriller. A great book and one of the best such adventure stories of the past ten years.

Sibyl Avery Jackson is a screenwriter, film producer, and author of Degree of Caution.

Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, is one of my all-time favorite childhood books. When I learned the Pulitzer Prize-winning author would be releasing Go Set A Watchman this summer, which takes place twenty years later with some of the same characters, I was delighted! And, I cannot wait to curl up on the sofa and catch up with my "old friends."

Jeffrey Kerr is the author of Seat of Empire: The Embattled Birth of Austin, Texas.

Robert Harris, Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome

I have read a lot of historical fiction novels over the years. Imperium is my favorite. The plot concerns the great Roman orator Cicero and his successful defense of an innocent man being framed by a rich and powerful governor, Verres. Cicero must overcome the greed, ambition, and corruption inherent to the Roman society of his day using only his intellect and the power of his voice. Suspenseful intrigue, gripping courtroom drama, and a powerful conclusion kept me up nights turning pages as fast as I could read them. There is no more fascinating figure of ancient Rome than Cicero and no better fictional treatment of his life than this book.

Manuel F. Medrano is a UT Brownsville historian and author of Americo Paredes: In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography.

Gary Jennings, Aztec

I highly recommend Aztec, the historical novel by Gary Jennings. Told through the words of Mixtli-Dark Cloud, it takes the reader on the historic Aztec journey from greatness to conquest. Reviewers call it remarkable and vivid.

Bill Minutaglio's books include Dallas 1963, City on Fire: The Explosion that Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle, and Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life.

Chris Fuhrman, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

The book, not the movie. It's a hilarious tribute to spontaneous anarchy, told in an intimate style but served up without "writerly" preening. It zips like a bouncy wooden roller coaster ride at a familiar park where they shoot off fireworks on aching, warm, summer nights. You might enjoy it even more if you had spent twelve years, like me, locked inside a Catholic education . . . the most challenging in the world . . . for many, vastly different, reasons. And you might read it twice even if you are not Catholic—because it's fun, chaotic in a good way, and imbued with that sense of being invited along to be part of the "cool kids"—the ones smarter than the teachers, parents, and all the other overly competitive, stressed-out authority figures. Hunter Thompson, Molly Ivins, and Timothy Leary would have read this if they were in a book club together—and so would anyone who ever had a "Jesus Was a Teenager Too" T-shirt. It's a tribute to raising your middle finger and laughing as the "grown-ups" try to out-Jones each other.

Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

I revisited this college campus comic novel not long ago, when my best friend in the world passed away. He was a brilliant Greek guy, a bartender and the smartest person I have ever known. And though he had no higher education, he deeply admired this book's rascally hero, a mercurial undergraduate (who happens to be Greek) grooving with the magic and smoke at a 1960s-era university. It's an Odyssey on an American campus saga, and the anchor is a sly seeker in search of higher meaning by any means necessary. He has an exceptional ability to read people—but is also deeply aware of his own rather substantial flaws. It's ultimately a very funny assault on folks who layer themselves in pretensions as they claw their way through their own eternal, only-the-strong-survive, winter. In other words, if you relish that Eternal Summer notion some of us Italians have—"dolce far niente," or the sweetness of doing nothing—then you might grin at how the hero shimmies and shakes his head at the folks rushing to join The Big Hamster Wheel.

Karen Olsson is a former editor of The Texas Observer, senior editor at Texas Monthly, and author of Waterloo: A Novel.

William Goyen, The House of Breath

This year marks the centenary of the birth of William Goyen (1915-1983), one of the best and weirdest writers Texas has produced. Goyen spent the first part of his childhood in Trinity, an East Texas sawmill town, and his work is haunted by memories of that place and echoes of its voices. I'd like to recommend his first and best-known book, The House of Breath, published in 1950. It's a beautiful, fraught fiction that Goyen called a series of "arias"—it gives itself over to a succession of narrators who share their recollections and visions of Charity, a town much like Trinity.

William Goyen, Come, The Restorer

I'd also recommend his 1974 book Come, The Restorer, an outlandish, funny, oversexed, and over-the-top novel set in an East Texas city and featuring a mysterious savior who falls into a coma (but retains a prominent erection), a tightrope walker, an oil king, unwitting incest, and a magical rattlesnake.

Clark Davis, It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing

Finally, I wish that there were more books by English professors (or by anybody, for that matter) as readable and insightful as Clark Davis's It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing. Published this year by University of Texas Press, it's a compelling and sympathetic account of Goyen's life and work. 

Frederick Steiner is dean of UT Austin's School of Architecture and author of Design for a Vulnerable Planet and Human Ecology: Following Nature's Lead.

Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

Anthony Doerr received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his wonderful All the Light We Cannot See. His gifts for observation of place and character are in full display in his earlier book. Four Seasons in Rome is an intimate journal of a year at the American Academy in Rome with his wife and infant twin sons. In Four Seasons in Rome, Doerr presents touching, funny, and insightful portraits of Rome, the American Academy, and his family. His domestic adventure occurs in the city where one can touch time and where urban nature supplies endless surprises.

Lonn Taylor served twenty years as a historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, and is the author of Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy.

Don Graham (editor), Lone Star Literature: From the Red River to the Rio Grande: A Texas Anthology

I recently picked up Don Graham's anthology Lone Star Literature (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), trying to find Larry McMurtry's scathing statement about J. Frank Dobie's total incompetence as a writer (it wasn't in there) and discovered that I could not put it down. I was diverted for an entire afternoon by the feast of this book's contents. Some pieces took me straight back to Austin in the 1960s as I recalled the excitement of reading Américo Paredes's "The Hammon and the Beans" when it was published in The Texas Observer and Dave Hickey's "I'm Bound to Follow the Longhorn Cows" in The University of Texas literary magazine, Reata. I actually read Hickey's manuscript before the story was published as we were friends and next-door neighbors in those days, and we had sung the song that supplied the title of the story together. Some pieces are old standbys which I never tire of re-reading, such as John Graves's "The Last Running," about the crusty old cattleman Charles Goodnight and some of his Comanche friends, and the opening chapter of Bill Brammer's "The Gay Place," which contains the finest description of the geography of Texas ever written.

But the best part was discovering Texas authors I had never heard of, people who published during the twenty-five years that I lived away from Texas: Pat Carr, Rafael Castillo, Clay Reynolds, Jim Sanderson, Peter LaSalle, and Aaron Latham, are all writers of great talent and a delight to read. The last piece in the book, William Gruben's "The Last History Ever of Fatigue in Texas," was the best surprise of all. I knew Gruben in Austin, when he was a graduate student in economics at UT, and I knew that he had become a successful banker in Dallas, but I had no idea that he had a flair for humorous writing or that he had been published in The Atlantic Monthly.

Thank you, Don Graham, for bringing me some nostalgic moments, re-introducing me to some old friends, and showing me that new Texas writers do not always look backwards.

Jason Walker is Director of Research at the Texas State Cemetery and author of Texas State Cemetery.

Bill Madden, 1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever

One of my favorite historical subjects has always been Negro League baseball. The early Negro League ballplayers were pioneers in the civil rights movement, even if they didn't realize it at the time. When Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, he dramatically changed American society. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education integrated public schools, however, Major League Baseball broke the color barrier seven years earlier. By 1954, half of the Major League Baseball teams had at least one black player on their roster.

Bill Madden explores how baseball helped to integrate America by focusing on the 1954 New York Giants led by Willie Mays. The book is a fascinating look at how Mays was loved by his white Southern teammates and gained the respect of all big leaguers with his passion for the game. With America racially divided at the time, especially in the South, 1954 would be the first time that black ballplayers would win a World Series. It was a significant achievement in the civil rights movement. Bill Madden was able to bring this tumultuous year into perspective and show how baseball finally became America's pastime.