Books

Undermain Theatre (3200 Main St.) captivated streaming audiences last year with St. Nicholas by Conor McPherson. It’s back and staged for live viewing with enough vampire coven to satisfy the Halloween itch and enough Bruce DuBose to trigger the brain’s voiceover recognition quadrant (it’s such a good voice). DuBose plays the theater critic enchanted by an actress and swept up by a coven, so fork over $15-$30 at undermain.org and experience the dark tale live (or online).

Gray clouds covered the sky as raindrops fell outside of Denise Montgomery’s front door window. It was the second Monday of October in 1965.

Maybe you promised yourself during lockdown that you’d finally get back into reading.

Some considered it the most dangerous book in Dallas, a moniker coined by D Magazine years after it was published. The Accommodation: the politics of race in an American City, traces race relations and politics in Dallas from slavery to the early ’80s. It argues slavery was crueler in North Texas…

As soon as Zac Crain got copies of his new book, he gave one to his son Isaac. Isaac hadn’t read any of the manuscript while it was in progress, but Crain knew he needed to be one of the first people to see it in print. I See You…

April showers bring May flowers, and one of those flowers is the reopening of Dallas’ public libraries.

Larry McMurtry was regularly seen out and about in his hometown Archer City,  25 miles southwest of Wichita Falls. He was easily recognizable in his usual ensemble: jeans, a Dr Pepper polo and an air of humility. He didn’t see himself as a star novelist who influenced authors around the…

Although they often write in self-imposed solitude, this month, scribes will have a chance to get … well … Zoom together for some all-nighter writing sessions. November is National Novel Writing Month and NaNoWriMoers nationwide will be jotting down 50,000 words before the clock strikes midnight on Nov. 30. “I…

By chance, two Texans teamed up for a tennis doubles match. It would be the beginning of a decades-long friendship, and a powerful one in terms of politics. “They went back-to-back men’s doubles championships by helping each other with their own weaknesses,” says Charles Denyer, author of Texas Titans. The…

When Jamie Thompson woke up on July 8, 2016, the city of Dallas and its brass were still trying to figure out what the hell happened the night before. There was a shooting, and five law enforcement officers were dead. The perpetrator had been killed by a robot-controlled bomb. And…

One early morning in 1974, Michael Taylor, a 14-year-old Black kid growing up in the inner-city projects of Corpus Christi, was walking to school when he heard an argument between two adults in the garage of a bike shop that drew him closer to the conversation. The argument was between…

When author Tim Miller reads back his writing, he hears the booming voice of his father, a Pentecostal preacher. Those kinds of preachers speak while they breathe, Miller explains, and their sermons are filled with intense fervor and conviction. The Dallas-based writer, now 49, was never a preacher himself, but…

Is it just us, or has the content quality of Instagram significantly declined since the pandemic started? Let’s be honest, we know all our daily screen time reports are skyrocketing, but what are we even looking at on Instagram? It’s not like people are still posting many vacation photos or…

With COVID-19 being the headlining blip on everyone’s radar and social distancing becoming the new normal, people are most likely going to be hanging around the house quite a bit. Between school closures, business closures and all cultural institutions on lockdown, day-to-day life may get pretty boring. The bad news…

Pickpockets, prostitutes, robbers and vagrants fill the pages of a recent book by TCU Press, the publishing house at Texas Christian University. While they may sound straight from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel, the cast of characters in Wanted in America: Posters Collected by the Fort Worth Police…

Whether your hands are weathered from snapping or you’re new to the sport, slam poetry is a great point of access to art, culture and a passion for the human condition. Poets take stories of love and heartbreak, unique perspectives on color and gender or political angst, bottle it up…

When he’s not shape-shifting into a part-time Bedford library assistant, Bret McCormick writes and edits hellacious horror stories. McCormick, along with E.R. Bills, another Texas author, began compiling an annual anthology of dreadful Lone Star-tinged tales about four years ago called Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers that’s been…

Arturo Torres has the best reason for missing my first phone call: His son was asleep on top of him. “Sorry, bro,” the illustrator is quick to say. “I’m a father now, so you know how it goes.” I do not, in fact, know how it goes, but anyone who…

After the reboot was set to take place in Austin, Good Christian Bitches is headed back to its home: Dallas. Good Christian Bitches, Kim Gatlin’s “semi-autobiographical” novel set in Hillside Park — an obvious riff on Highland Park — was turned into a TV series starring Leslie Bibb and Kristin Chenoweth in 2012…

Monday, October 28 Ghost Tour DallasDon’t let the sparkling uptown high-rise condo buildings fool you: Dallas can be creepy as hell. (We have a giant eyeball sculpture in the middle of downtown, for Christ’s sake.) And what better night to discover how dramatically haunted the city really is than Halloween?…

Monday, October 14 Sontag: Her Life and WorkThe DMA Arts & Letters Live series will feature a talk with biographer Benjamin Moser about his newest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, which dissects the words and life of essayist, playwright, filmmaker and activist Susan Sontag — who examined controversial topics…

Tuesday, October 8 Four Hours of Fury Author and U.S. Army vet James Fenelon will sign copies of his book Four Hours of Fury: The Untold Story of World War II’s Largest Airborne Invasion and the Final Push into Nazi Germany, a nonfiction account of … well, read the title,…