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2.26. 2015 Dear friend of Texas books, We hope you're enjoying Lone Star Literary Life, your NEW resource for news, events, and reviews of books by,
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2.26. 2015
Dear friend of Texas books,
We hope you're enjoying Lone Star Literary Life, your NEW resource for news, events, and reviews of books by, about, or for Texas authors and readers, plus useful directories of bookstores, publishers, writers' groups, and more. It's about time we had a news and promotion outlet of our own!
You're receiving this free newsletter because of your role in Texas books or publishing, or your relationship to one of our past projects. (You may unsubscribe at any time -- but we hope you'll continue to follow us and make full use of the resources on our website.)
We post new issues each Sunday morning about the time you're settling in for your second cup of coffee -- and then, for those in the profession who read their business emails from Monday through Friday, a Midweek Update with a few additional news items. We hope you appreciate receiving both editions.
Thanks!
Kay Ellington, Publisher • Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor
info@LoneStarLiterary.com |
Coming up in Lone Star Literary Life Sunday, March 1:
Happiness for Beginners, the new novel by Houston author Katherine Center, will be out in March. We'll talk with the author about Molly Ivins, Larry McMurtry, writing "the story you want to read," happiness, and life in Texas. (Or are those all the same thing?)
Center, the author of five novels about love and family: The Bright Side of Disaster, Everyone Is Beautiful, Get Lucky, The Lost Husband, and Happiness for Beginners, recently signed a three-book deal with St. Martin’s Press. Her books and essays have appeared in Redbook, People, USA Today, Vanity Fair, and Real Simple.
People Magazine calls The Lost Husband “A sweet tale about creating the family you need.” Library Journal calls Get Lucky a “thoroughly enjoyable girlish romp,” and Kirkus Reviews likens Everyone Is Beautiful to the 1950s motherhood classic Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Center is a graduate of Vassar College and University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. |
 Houston novelist Katherine Center |
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Gracing the cover of the University of Texas Press's spring catalog is a trio of Matt Lankes's striking black-and-white photographic portraits—of one young actor over the course of a dozen years of his life. Boyhood: Twelve Years on Film showcases Austin director Richard Linklater’s monumental film undertaking, Boyhood, which recently won awards at the Golden Globes and Academy Awards. >> more (scroll to bottom of page to view slide show of selected images from the book) |
 Glenn Dromgoole |
Midland author Patrick Dearen’s latest novel, The Big Drift (TCU Press, $22.95 paperback), focuses on two cowboys—one white, one black—and the brutal conditions they endured during the blizzard of 1884 and the ensuing cattle roundup the next spring. >>more |
 Matt Minor, chief of staff for a representative in the Texas House, will release his thriller The Representative on Texas Independence Day, Mar. 2. |
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Texas political insider Matt Minor, who lives with his wife, Stacy, on their ranch property in Wharton County, Texas, and maintains an apartment in Austin, recently took time during a busy legislative session to talk with LSLL.
LSLL: Besides the obvious career connection, what led you to write The Representative?
Matt Minor: For a while I’ve wanted to combine the concept of art and politics. Basically using the idea that if art is a search for truth then politics is the concealment of it. The protagonist [of The Representative] is a poet, but his true art form is his romanticism. This he conceals from the world until he arrives at the state capitol and discovers his first love is there as well. Can love survive politics? is the question I asked myself repeatedly while writing it. >> more |
Scott Blackwood See How Small
Reviewed by Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor
FICTION Little, Brown, Hardcover, January 20, 2015, 978-0316373807, 224 pp., $25.00 (also available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook versions)
reviewed 2.22.2015 by Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor
See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?
Zadie, Elizabeth, and Meredith are closing up the ice cream shop where they work when the men with guns appear. After, the men set the shop ablaze. “It grew hot, dark and wet like first things.” Texans will recognize this scenario immediately. Four teenage girls were raped and murdered and the shop set on fire in an Austin I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop in 1991. In a bit of speculative fiction that borrows from historical events, Scott Blackwood creates a cast of haunted characters: the mother of two of the girls, the firefighter who found the bodies, a regular customer of the ice cream shop, a reporter, a suspect and—reminding me a bit of The Lovely Bones—the girls themselves.
See How Small hooks you in the first paragraph with the voices of these girls, after. >> read more |
Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, where she handles Lone Star Literary Reviews and Bookish Texas Events. She's also a reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. |
Looking for a good book? Want to meet a good author? Follow Bookish Texas each week at Lone Star Literary Life. >>READ MORE |
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