Articles

Greg Beets and Richard Whymark

It's 1990 in Austin, Texas. The next decade will be a tipping point in the city's metamorphosis from sleepy college town to major city. Beneath the increasingly slick exterior, though, a group of like-minded contrarians were reimagining an underground music scene. Embracing a do-it-yourself ethos, record labels emerged to release local music, zines cheered and jeered acts beneath the radar of mainstream media outlets, and upstart clubs provided a home venue for new bands to build their sound.

The first book about Austin underground music in the 1990s, A Curious Mix of People is an oral history that tells the story of this transformative decade through the eyes of the musicians, writers, DJs, club owners, record-store employees, and other key figures who were there.

Edward Carey

The year is 1901. England's beloved queen has died, and her aging son has finally taken the throne. In the eastern city of Norwich, young Edith Holler spends her days among the boisterous denizens of the Holler Theatre, warned by her domineering father that the playhouse will literally tumble down if she should ever leave its confines. Fascinated by tales of the city she knows only from afar, she decides to write a play of her own: a stage adaptation of the legend of Mawther Meg, a monstrous figure said to have used the blood of children to make the local delicacy known as Beetle Spread. But when her father suddenly announces his engagement to a peculiar, imposing woman named Margaret Unthank, heir to the actual Beetle Spread fortune, Edith scrambles to protect her father, the theatre, and her play—the one thing that's truly hers—from the newcomer's sinister designs.

Teeming with unforgettable characters and illuminated by the author's trademark fantastical illustrations, Edith Holler is a surprisingly modern fable of one young woman's struggle to escape her family's control—and to reveal inconvenient truths about the way children are used.

George Getschow

This collection of essays offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America's preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life.

When he died in 2021, McMurtry was one of America's most revered writers. The author of treasured novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show and coauthor of the screenplays for Brokeback Mountain and Streets of Laredo, McMurtry created unforgettable characters and landscapes largely drawn from his life growing up on the family's hardscrabble ranch outside his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Pastures of the Empty Page brings together fellow writers to honor the man and his impact on American letters.

Contributors include Paulette Jiles, Stephen Harrigan, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Lawrence Wright alongside McMurtry's screenwriting partner Diana Ossana and his brother Charlie McMurtry. In contrast to his curmudgeonly persona, Pastures of the Empty Page paints a picture of McMurtry as a trustworthy friend and supportive mentor. McMurtry was famously self-deprecating, but as his admirers attest, this self-described "minor regional writer" was an artist for the ages.

S. C. Gwynne

The tragic fate of the British airship R101—which went down in a spectacular fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later—has been largely forgotten. In His Majesty's Airship, historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist S. C. Gwynne resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong.

Gwynne's chronicle features a cast of remarkable—and tragically flawed—characters, including Lord Christopher Thomson, the man who dreamed up the Imperial Airship Scheme and then relentlessly pushed R101 to her destruction; Princess Marthe Bibesco, the celebrated writer and glamorous socialite with whom he had a long affair; and George Herbert Scott, a national hero who was the first person to cross the Atlantic twice in any aircraft, in 1919—eight years before Lindbergh's famous flight—but who devolved into drink and ruin. These historical figures—and the ship they built, flew, and crashed—come together in "a Promethean tale of unlimited ambitions and technical limitations, airy dreams and explosive endings" (The Wall Street Journal).

Laekan Zea Kemp

Award-winning author Laekan Zea Kemp's heart-wrenching novel-in-verse follows two teens who must come together to heal the pain from their pasts, perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo and Nicola Yoon.

Danna Mendoza Villarreal's grandfather is slowly losing himself as his memories fade, and Danna's not sure her plan to help him remember through the foods he once reviewed will be enough to bring him back. Especially when her own love of food makes her complicated relationship with her mother even more difficult.

Raúl Santos has been lost ever since his mother was wrongly incarcerated two years ago. Playing guitar for the elderly has been his only escape—to help them remember and him forget. But when his mom unexpectedly comes back into his life, what is he supposed to do when she isn't the same person who left?

When Danna and Raúl meet, sparks fly immediately and they embark on a mission to heal her grandfather . . . and themselves. Because healing is something best done together—even if it doesn't always look the way we want it to.

Jardine Libaire

It's springtime in Oklahoma, and Ernie feels uneasy. Nerves at the abandoned summer camp where he and his fellow oddballs are crashing have been on edge since the arrival of a teenager named Coral, unceremoniously dropped off from her family's minivan one afternoon. Adding to her aura of mystery, Coral doesn't say a word. Ever.

When an explosion burns the compound to the ground, Ernie, Coral, and the hard-living couple Staci and Ray escape on a pair of motorcycles to a rundown house in rural Texas: It's a place to stay, they tell themselves, for now. Yet to their surprise, over card games and wild strawberries and target-shooting and late-night dancing to ZZ Top on the local radio, a quirky little family forms. At the heart of their new home is Coral, whose silence only amplifies her strange, undefinable power and the sense that she found them for a reason.

But soon, tensions rise, and a mysterious threat begins to materialize—whether it's coming from inside or outside the house still isn't clear. All this crew knows is, now there's something at stake: their chosen family, forged by both loneliness and joy, and bonded by an awkward kind of love.

Taylor Moore

After hunting down a rogue spy as part of an elite CIA counterespionage unit, Garrett Kohl returns to Texas in hopes of settling down. While learning the ropes of fatherhood, falling deeper in love with his high school crush, and rebuilding his wildfire-ravaged cattle ranch, he is approached in secret by an engineer working at a nearby nuclear weapons plant. Garrett soon embarks on an off-the-books investigation and learns that Iranian operatives are blackmailing weapons facility employees and planning a devastating act of destruction.

Before Garrett's CIA team can take down the extortionists, enemy commandos hijack a train carrying nuclear weapons and activate an assassin to murder the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Caught flatfooted by the sudden attack, Garrett musters the only help he can find—a ragtag crew of outcasts and outlaws, some of whom he'd once put behind bars. Although they're from different walks of life, and opposite sides of the law, they hold in common the deep desire to protect their homes, their families, and their way of life on the remote Texas High Plains.

Carmen Tafolla

A celebration of the power of public art to express a community's cultural heritage, Arte del Pueblo explores San Antonio's heart and soul. In moving photography and poetic commentary, it covers five genres of public art in a variety of artistic styles, from murals, sculpture, and mosaics to street art and digital art projections. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of this multicultural crossroad through an introduction to its major artistic influences, as well as thought-provoking interviews with eleven of the 190 artists featured. San Antonio's public artworks can be found everywhere: from its famous River Walk to the West Side Barrio, in parks and libraries, along roadways and bridges, on high-rises and restaurants. The book's suggested self-tours guide those who wish to appreciate their favorite pieces in person.

Don Tate

Before Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo Switch, there was a tinkerer named Jerry Lawson. As a boy, Jerry loved playing with springs, sprockets, and gadget-y things. When he grew up, Jerry became an engineer—a professional tinkerer—and in the 1970s, he turned his technical know-how to video games.

Back then, if players wanted a new video game, they had to buy an entire new console, making gaming very expensive. Jerry was determined to fix this problem, and despite roadblocks along the way and having to repeat a level or two, it was never game over for his mission. Eventually, he leveled up and built a brand-new kind of video game console: one that allowed players to switch out cartridges! He also founded Video Soft Inc., the first African American–owned video game company in the country.

Jerry's tinkering and inventions changed the video gaming world forever. Today, gamers have access to hundreds of video games at the push of a button, all thanks to him.

Ron Tyler

Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from telegraphy to railroads. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture. One of the great subjects of the lithography boom was an emerging Euro-American colony in the Americas: Texas.

The most complete collection of its kind—and quite possibly the most complete visual record of nineteenth-century Texas, period—Texas Lithographs is a gateway to the history of the Lone Star State in its most formative period. Ron Tyler assembles works from 1818 to 1900, many created by outsiders and newcomers promoting investment and settlement in Texas. The images collected here envision an Eden of opportunity—a fairy-tale dream that remains foundational to Texans' sense of self and to the world's sense of Texas.