Just a few years ago, a serious discussion of the “literary” scene in Dallas would have felt a little forced. Our fair city is known for a lot of things — well, at least a few — but breeding, attracting, inspiring and keeping writers of literature has not been one…
You will think you know what Target in the Night is when you begin reading it, but you’ll be wrong. Ricardo Piglia — the author of this latest release by Dallas’ Deep Vellum publishing house, seamlessly translated from Spanish by Sergio Waisman — sets you down in 1970s Argentina. A…
There is no better season for reading a book than winter. The cold chases you inside to the respite of a warm coffee, the licks of a freshly lit fire in the fireplace. In your hand? A new book you’ll devour to keep your mind occupied. But in this winter…
Fall creeps into Dallas this month with everything pumpkin and, if we’re lucky, glorious weather. The temperatures are dropping below 80 degrees more often and you might just see a few leaves turn to orange. And if you find this weather, makes your want to curl up with a good…
“In the beginning was the stone and the stone prompted ownership” is how Fiston Mwanza Mujilla’s Tram 83 opens. An epigraph that serves as an elusive foreshadowing of the story that follows. The stone in question is a diamond, African diamonds, to be specific, which have prompted a diamond-rush in…
If you’re on the highway Thursday afternoon and you notice a straight couple on a motorcycle, and the girl looks suspiciously like Tibby from Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, don’t strain your neck looking. Yes, that’s actress Amber Tamblyn. And no, that role is not the most interesting thing about…
The only libraries at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center are law libraries. Inmates crowd in the rooms on a weekday, buried in legal books, as if they’re in law school. And in a sense they are. People use the law libraries here mainly to understand their criminal charges, looking for…
The first time I stepped foot in a public library, I was an eleven-year-old awkward new girl in Butler, Pennsylvania: a steel mill town north of Pittsburgh. Since my family had already moved twelve times by then, I was used to panicking over where to sit at lunch and navigating…
It isn’t often that you hear the words “Dallas-based author” and “ultimate orgasm” in the same sentence, but for Jenny Block, that’s just life. Her first book, Open, a book about “sex within the context of open marriage,” thrust Block into the world of “sexperts.” From there, she became a…
Lucky Dog Books struggled at 633 W. Davis St. for three years. But just as they were closing up shop to make way for a new tenant, the customers showed how much they cared. It was enough to convince the owners to reopen at another location in Oak Cliff. After…
Last month, Dallas-based author Sarah Hepola released her first book, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. The memoir focuses on Hepola’s alcoholism and ultimate recovery, written with a focus on her frequent blackouts. In a tone that’s funny, intimate and often heart-wrenchingly sincere, Hepola shares the early childhood…
Everyone is a little bit curious about what exactly happens in the Playboy Mansion. Hugh Hefner’s former girlfriend Holly Madison published a tell-all book, Down The Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny, about her time living in the Playboy Mansion while dating the world’s most…
In most industries, summer is the time for the sugar-coated, mindless entertainment. There’s the dance party anthems in the music industry; the blockbuster films in film. It’s not that different for books. With the expectation of beach vacations and weekend visits to the pool, you’ll occasionally hear publishers talk about…
In “Language Saved,” one of eight short stories in Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories, Russian author Mikhail Shishkin writes, “The experience of a language and the life lived through it turns languages with different pasts into non-communicating vessels.” Translation is mutation, he insists, which makes Deep Vellum’s release of the…
Picture with me, for a moment, a hypothetical. You’re nearing the end of your life, a fabulously intellectual life. A life people will want to read about (like I said, this is purely a hypothetical). It’s rapidly becoming apparent that you’re going to have to write about it, since people…
George Henson first heard rumors of a man interested in starting a translation publishing house in Dallas about two years ago. Henson was teaching Spanish at the University of Texas at Dallas and working toward a PhD in Humanities with an emphasis on literary and translation studies. He reached out…
One of the most striking passages of Mary Helen Specht’s debut novel Migratory Animals comes in the final pages. After hundreds of pages in which she weaves together a story of friendships, family, love and loss, the novel’s protagonist, Flannery, reflects on her attitude arriving in Nigeria as a scientist,…
Between 1987 and 1989, Nathan Nipper, the Bedford-based author of Dallas ‘Til I Cry: Learning to Love Major League Soccer, was a soccer-obsessed 12 year-old son of missionary parents on the go. In those two impactful years, the Nippers moved from Rose Bud, Arkansas (population 202 at that time), to…
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…
