Luke Goebel has something of a reputation in Tyler, Texas. When he goes for a haircut, say, the barber is likely to know him, even if they haven’t met. Word of the eccentric writer spreads throughout the smallish East Texas town via the parents of his students. “People go, ‘Oh,…
Local author Merritt Tierce is quite the media darling these days. After publishing her debut novel Love Me Back, Tierce has made the rounds on TV, been compared to Joan Didion by one critic, and perhaps most famously, told The Dallas Morning News about the time she donated Rush Limbaugh’s…
In downtown Portland, Powell’s Books stretches the length of a city block. Inside, hundreds of wooden bookshelves stuffed to the brim with everything from classic literature to engineering manuals keep crowds of regulars and tourists engrossed. When you go to Portland, you have to go to Powell’s. Even readers who…
Merritt Tierce spent her mid-twenties waiting tables at a Dallas steakhouse. She was a writer, sure, but she spent most of her days serving the elite and struggling toward 30. That this experience would serve as formative life experience and become fodder for her first novel, Love Me Back surprises…
Tonight in Denton at Dan’s Silverleaf local author Darin Bradley will officially release his second novel Chimpanzee complete with a live rendition of the audioplay of the novel. Bradley released his first novel, Noise, through Random House in 2010 while he was still working as a lead video game writer…
Let’s say you took a six-month-long apprenticeship as a publisher with Open Letter Books — a small independent publishing house at The University of Rochester in New York, dedicated to bringing great works from around the world to the English-speaking world. Now let’s say you move to Dallas in 2013,…
The Internet has not been kind to the printed word. It’s deformed language, crippled print journalism, and perhaps most depressing of all, it’s suffocating books. You know, the bouquets of paper you check out from libraries; the gently used paperback you rescue from Half-Priced Books; America’s next great novel available…
It’s 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning and Dr. Charissa Terranova is regretting last night’s purchase of the iPhone 5. “I’m really not happy with Apple as a company right now,” she explains. “I may take it back and get the new Samsung.” This week she may be deliberating on her…
It’s unclear how we got quite so lucky, but indie film’s most famous mug, Parker Posey, will read for Art and Letters Live’s 2014 Texas Bound series. The popular showcase pulls well-known actors (Tommy Lee Jones, Kathy Bates and Larry Hagman have all previously lent their voices) to read short…
This magician’s crate wouldn’t quite fit as a carry-on. It’s a custom-built blend of wood and metal, perched on casters, painted black and decorated by a white rope pattern that crisscrosses its width. It serves as a sculptural rolling library for the 12 books hiding inside. They slide in and…
If you didn’t get enough literary nerdiness at last weekend’s FenCon, never fear. The indie publishing industry descends on Dallas this weekend with vengeance. Indie Vengeance. As in IndieVengeance Day. Get it? No? Either way it goes down Saturday, October 12 at Half-Price Books (5803 East Northwest Highway)…
The Wes Anderson Collection, an artful and comprehensive new coffee table book released today, sheds light on the popular auteur’s films. Featuring a generous spread of rare, behind-the-scenes photos, an introduction by novelist Michael Chabon, critical essays and much more, the book is a must for Anderson fans. The book’s…
It’s well into August and you haven’t made a dent in that super-ambitious summer reading list you made for yourself back in May, have you? Whether you aimed to catch up on the classics or relax with the latest beach-reads, time is just not on your side. Poolside boozing and…
We momentarily empathized with Justin Bieber as he made the walk of shame to a chorus of boos to accept the first-ever Milestone Award at the 2013 Billboard Music Awards, defeating Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars. “I’m 19 years old…I think I’m doing a pretty good job,” he said defensively…
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,…
