I’m not quite finished with Philipp Meyer’s just-released Texas epic The Son, but unless the ending is a complete disaster I think it’s safe to say it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, and certainly one of my favorite books about and set in the Lone Star State…
I read something in Esquire the other day that caught me off-guard. It was about how, despite the near-constant bemoaning of our culture’s waning attention span and the media industry’s cratering business model, we’re actually in a Golden Age for writers. The article, by Stephen Marche, makes a pretty good…
Any discussion of the Holocaust is a necessarily sensitive one, with the capacity to get tense. Toss in the possibility of an American technology giant working in collusion with the Nazis to track the inhabitants of the death camps, and you’ve got the makings for one intriguing and possibly uncomfortable…
J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, arrived in bookstores yesterday. According to advance reports, the new book contains lots of sex (in the form of “a miraculously unguarded vagina” and a used condom that is “like the gossamer cocoon of some huge grub”), domestic abuse and an…
See also: Lucien Freud’s Portraits are Skilled, Smart and Sad, and He Probably Had Sex with Them At times like this, I don’t mind having two virtually useless degrees in the humanities, though it is a crushing reality that would normally inspire any reasonable person to routinely sob herself to…
“The gaming industry didn’t set out to be an educational tool,” says Meadows School of the Arts Dean José Antonio Bowen, “But we need to be that engaging, interesting and compelling. We need to adopt that energy in order to get students hooked, so that they will want to tackle…
Earlier today, Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Horseman, Pass By, began auctioning off some 300,000 books from his antiquarian store, Booked Up. The taciturn man of letters said he does not want to burden his children with nearly half a million…
When Larry McMurtry began writing his memoirs, the first volume of which was published in 2008, he saw it necessary to divide his life into three distinct sections: Books, Literary Life, and Hollywood. It is no coincidence that Books, the recounting of his life as a “rare bookman,” came first,…
Yes. It’s true. Next Friday, August 17, a group of Dallas women will sit proud in front of an audience and read passages from their favorite stories, completely in the nude. It’s a literary trend appropriately titled Naked Girls Reading, and now, after a two year hiatus, it’s returned to…
New York Times best-selling romance novelist Jodi Thomas sets a lot of her torrid historical tales in Fort Worth, and her latest release — set to drop on August 7 — is no exception. The multiple RITA Award winner’s 35th book and 6th in her “Whispering Mountain” series, Wild Texas…
This is not Lori Ann Stephens’ first rodeo. Well, it is in the sense that it is her debut novel that suddenly shot to No. 1 on the Amazon Bestseller List for Top Free Literary Fiction over the Fourth of July. But that novel — Song of the Orange Moons…
I won’t claim to understand much about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, though not because I have moral or personal objections to the subject matter. In fact, I’d posit that the key to world peace lies not in economic policy or cultural diplomacy so much as a few good…
By now, most every paper that matters has thoroughly and appropriately eulogized feminist journalist and funny-woman, Nora Ephron, who died Tuesday evening at the age of 71. In fact, our even trying to characterize her life as beautifully or as intimately as The New York Times or The Atlantic –…
Nestled in a corner of Jackson Armory and adjacent to Snider Plaza, Rosedale Rare Books is as unassuming as, well, one would expect an independently-owned, antiquarian bookstore to be. Due to the nature of its surroundings – the armory specializes in antique weaponry, and its walls are lined with rifles,…
This little gem has been circulating the intertubes the last few days, repulsing even the most avid of book lovers. Hey you, do you have a home library with full walls of bookshelves? Oxblood red sofas with brass tacks and a ladder with which to scale your erudite collection? Keep…
Four years ago, Ray Bradbury was scheduled for a book signing at the Barnes and Noble in Los Angeles for his short story collection, We’ll Always Have Paris. I was in LA at the time working, and had seen Bradbury speak several times on the subject of how movies these…
We’ll hand it to anybody who puts “kick ass” in the title of his workshop. We are, after all, living in a world that would define marriage in a way exclusionary to a mutant and his adorbs long-term boyfriend, so it takes a fair bit of chutzpah to dive into…
Being an election year, you’d be right to expect that more than a few politicos will be crawling out of the woodwork to invigorate their respective bases and jostle the American public from its Twinkie coma to pull down some votes. And that’s exactly what we suspect MSNBC analyst Chris…
It’s hard not to hate a guy who gets a review this good in The New York Times, but when it comes to Ben Fountain, you’ve got to cheer him on. He’s down-to-earth and affable, and that’s not even to mention his undeniable talent. Fountain’s first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long…
The label “housewife” doesn’t really suit Kelly Killoren Bensimon. The word invokes images of tomato-stained aprons and constant scuttling, but those are unlikely components of Bensimon’s world. The Real Housewives, NYC star, former model and author of the new book I Can Make You Hot!: The 3-Day Supermodel Diet likely…
Last summer, we brought you news of NoViolet Bulawayo, an SMU alumna who was named 12th Caine Prize winner. Bulawayo received a master’s in literature here in Dallas before heading to Cornell for an MFA, where she honed her already remarkable talent and launched a career as one of the…
Ben Fountain wrote a novel. Here, you digest that for a moment. That Ben Fountain. O. Henry Award-winning, dual Pushcart Prize-snatching, Texas Institute of Letters award-swiping, McGinnis Richie Prize-fighting, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award-conquering, Whiting Writers Award-seizing Ben Fountain. And, he’s reading from his yet-unreleased novel on Thursday night in Lakewood. “But,…
