Texas Book Festival — San Antonio Edition:
San Antonio sometimes gets knocked for not being literary, or even literate, enough for such a big city with such grand “creative class” ambitions.
4/10/2013
Texas Book Festival — San Antonio Edition:
You Can’t Go Home Again: Fiction about Family Secrets with Nan Cuba and Andrew Porter
By Scott Andrews
4/10/2013
Texas Book Festival — San Antonio Edition:
Laurie Ann Guerrero’s collection Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying won the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and was published February 15 by University of...
By Scott Andrews
4/10/2013
Texas Book Festival — San Antonio Edition:
Ricardo Ainslie frequented Juárez during its most violent years, as war between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels raged and soaked the city in blood.
By Michael Barajas
4/10/2013
Texas Book Festival — San Antonio Edition:
The Shadow Catcher: A U.S. Agent Infiltrates Mexico’s Deadly Crime Cartels
By Michael Barajas
4/10/2013
Texas Book Festival — San Antonio Edition:
You know what they say, writing about filming is like painting about mixology, or something. By many accounts Pulitzer prize-winning Glenn Frankel has reversed...
By Nathan Cone
4/10/2013
Texas Book Festival — San Antonio Edition:
In his newest book, Going Clear, Austin-based journalist Lawrence Wright profiles Scientology, a new American religion that, while ubiquitous among the...
By Michael Barajas
4/10/2013
Texas Book Festival — San Antonio Edition:
At War Over the Environment: Two Experts on the Politics of Parks and the Natural World with George Bristol and Char Miller
By Callie Enlow
4/10/2013
- Review, 'Days That I'll Remember: Spending time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono'
In the world of that ancient thing called "journalism," you were not supposed to hang out too much with the people you wrote about.
| 2/13/2013
- Lawrence Wright paints a troubling portrait of Scientology
In lawsuits, plaintiffs routinely file "interrogatories," questions defendants must answer as a case heads to discovery. By far, the strangest I've...
| 2/6/2013
- Holiday books explore holy lands and the devil
It's officially winter next week. So the days are darker and the nights are longer, and some of us who might otherwise crave warmth and...
| 12/12/2012
- 'Rebozos' weaves women's stories from two languages
In an era when books are being banned, hers included, San Antonio's poet laureate Carmen Tafolla is mindfully doing what she does best...
| 10/31/2012
- Caught between home and the mainland, characters of 'Traveler's Rest' writhe
From the political strife of the 1920s to a hurricane in 2005, Traveler's Rest, by San Antonio-based author and editor Jonathan Marcantoni, offers a series of...
| 10/10/2012
- 'American Copia' offers an all-access pass to our national entitlements
"Today I am going to the grocery store," begins Javier O. Huerta's American Copia: an Immigrant Epic. This is the sentence the INS required him, as...
| 10/10/2012
- A Triad of Intangible Territories
Unless dealing with outright metaphysics, much nonfiction is mere map-making, stencil patterns, or instruction. And it really has something to do with the...
| 9/12/2012
- A cheater's guide to love
Despite all the TV jokes about New Jersey, it has long been the bedrock for our best writers — from Dorothy Parker and Philip Roth to William Carlos Williams and...
| 9/12/2012
- Sugar, spice, and gender coalesce in trio of bilingual kids' books
I have a surprise for you, I tell my four-year-old daughter when I pick her up from preschool. Three surprises, actually.
| 8/1/2012
- Turbulence undergirds offerings by these Texas authors
Never let anyone try to tell you what a Texas writer is supposed to be. Here are three Texans that cover everything from the skin trade to cautionary...
| 7/17/2012
- Helton's 'Drugs' doesn't demand destruction or redemption
Books about drug use appear regularly on publisher's lists, and whether written as fiction or biography, their plots usually follow a pattern that culminates in...
| 5/16/2012
- School's out: fill your head with candy, Pac-Man, and Crumb
For the already over-hot citizens of San Antonio, the summer months should be a time to seek out necessary shade and cool off with a hot new book title.
| 5/16/2012
- Gustavo Arellano's 'Taco USA' book tour comes to San Antonio with dire warning for regional cuisine
Gustavo Arellano writes "Ask a Mexican," a syndicated weekly Q&A about all things, and anything, Mexican. Two summers ago I rendezvoused with...
| 5/5/2012
- Last Stand Myth: The Texan defenders stood their ground, dying to a man within the walls of the Alamo
"False," writes U.S. Air Force military historian Phillip Thomas Tucker in his 2010 study Exodus from the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth. According to Tucker...
| 4/18/2012
- How Texas brought Ronald Reagan back from the dead
Looking at America's political map today, it is hard to believe that, for most of the nation's history, Texas was a Democratic stronghold.
| 4/18/2012
- 'Children in Reindeer Woods' by Kristín Ómarsdóttir
What is it about icebound exports and child captivity? From the intoxicating rhythms of “Birthday,” an oddly suggestive New Wave lullaby by the Sugarcubes, to...
| 3/21/2012
- 'Burn Down' delivers true American Gothic
The discomforting cliché that out of bad pain comes good comedy — an assurance that has, in some form or other, been made by acerbic jokers from Mark Twain to...
| 3/21/2012
- Chris Perez, husband of slain Tejana icon Selena, tells of romance, suffering
In one of the final chapters of his book To Selena, With Love (out March 6), Selena's widower Chris Perez mentions that Abraham Quintanilla, his former father-in-law, once...
| 3/7/2012
- Book review: 'The Third Reich' by Roberto Bolaño
A few years after George Steiner penned an essay about Hitler's architect Albert Speer for the New Yorker and New Wave sellouts Spandau Ballet cracked the...
| 2/15/2012
- 'Dealing Death and Drugs' delivers strong case for legal weed
When Juárez cartel gangster Jose Antonio "El Diego" Acosta Hernandez was arrested last summer he had an estimated 1,500 murders under his belt...
| 2/15/2012
- Book Review: 'Bouncing Off Guardrails'
"Who the hell is waking me up by ringing my fucking doorbell at 2:30 am? It must be Sunshine, but why doesn't she just use her key?
| 2/15/2012
- 'Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic'
Ever read a poem about a guy who emotionally abuses a mannequin and leaves her silicon heart broken in a dumpster? Me neither, and I've suffered through more than a few Ted Hughes tomes. But this scenario, beautifully rendered in Esther M. Garcia's haunting
| 2/15/2012
- Stragglers own the center of 'Before the End'
Dagoberto Gilb's new collection, Before the End, After the Beginning, is filled with the strivers, drifters, and dreamers who inhabit the Southwest from Los Angeles to Austin...
| 12/21/2011
- Photog attempts to sidestep gun advocacy despite loaded subject
“My art world friends really thought this project was misguided on my part,” said New York-based photographer Lindsay McCrum. “
| 12/14/2011
- A child's view from a hot place fails to escape the pit
Hell, despite what Sartre, said about it being “other people,” is usually depicted as a lonely place
| 10/24/2011
- The Exorcist novel turns 40
Perhaps the reason The Exorcist is such a terrifying experience is because author William Peter Blatty wasn’t even trying to be scary.
| 10/26/2011
- Jennifer Shaw’s ‘Hurricane Story’
Photographs of children’s toys threw yet another fatiguing stain of kitsch into the cultural wash over the last decade
| 9/7/2011
- Byron’s hex: SA author’s occult fantasy
Lord Byron might have been described by his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”
| 8/31/2011
- When inner space mattered
Before Star Wars ruined everything for science fiction by introducing to the general public a fallen Republic
| 8/3/2011
- Conquistadora: a nation incomplete
The land is Puerto Rico, and most of the story takes place in and around a sugar plantation
| 8/3/2011
