Kambri Crews’ New Memoir Chronicles Childhood With Deaf Parents
Burn Down the Ground, Kambri Crews’ moving new memoir, in part tells the story of her coming of age as the hearing child of deaf parents. Early on, Crews became her mother and father’s “interpreter,”...
View ArticleThe Other Side of the American Dream
Many of us find it difficult to practice diplomacy with our relatives. But when typical family squabbles are complicated by national borders—as they are in Reyna Grande’s excellent new memoir, The...
View ArticleFaith in a Dead-End Town
Michael Morris’ sweet, sad-eyed new novel, Man in the Blue Moon, recalls great Southern literature: beloved works such as Olive Ann Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree and Fannie Flagg’s Daisy Fay and the Miracle...
View ArticleSkeletons in a Small Town’s Closet
Janis Owens’ powerful new novel American Ghost recalls Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, the 1944 classic remembered, in part, for its brave portrayal of lynching. Owens’ book also tackles that barbaric...
View ArticleSouth American Gothic: Edward Swift’s The Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint
Edward Swift’s latest novel, The Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint, is a tumultuous, epic work of magical realism, half The Count of Monte Cristo and half One Hundred Years of Solitude. Readers like...
View ArticleLady Bird in her Own Words
Michael L. Gillette’s Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History—compiled from 47 interviews conducted with the former first lady between 1977 and 1996 as part of the LBJ Presidential Library’s Oral history...
View ArticleAbusing Their Religion: Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology,...
In Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright—winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11—returns to his...
View ArticleWitnessing Democracy in El Salvador
Earlier this year, I traveled to El Salvador with my friend, activist Sissy Farenthold—a trip arranged by the human rights organization SHARE El Salvador—to serve as an international observer of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Compassionate Imagination of Sarah Bird
Sarah Bird will speak and sign copies of Above the East China Sea at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 29, at BookPeople in Austin. When I first began Sarah Bird’s lyrical new novel, Above the East China Sea, I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Remembering Nadine Eckhardt (1931-2018)
Editor’s note: Legendary Austinite and politico Nadine Eckhardt died Saturday, December 8, 2018, at age 87. As Robert Leleux wrote in his review of her memoir, Duchess of Palms, if Billy Lee Brammer’s...
View Article