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Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com Nigel Cliff is a historian, biographer, and translator. His first book, The Shakespeare Riots, was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing and was chosen as one of the Washington Post’s best books of the year. His second book, The Last Crusade:…

Editors Liles and Boswell honored with 25th annual Liz Carpenter Award at annual TSHA conference HOUSTON—The Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) named the winner for the 25th Annual Liz Carpenter Award for Best Scholarly Book on the History of Women and Texas. The Liz Carpenter Award is presented annually at the Women’s History Lunch at…

Most of the readers and writers we know, far from being the sort to only haunt the recesses of their town’s library or curl up on the couch when the sun’s shining, like to get out and visit the places they’ve read about. Or the places that inspire them. We polled our staff—in a most…

Projections are that the El Paso, Texas, MSA (which includes El Paso and Hudspeth counties) will pass 1 million in 2020. The current population is 923,936, making it the sixth largest MSA in the state. The distance from the state’s largest market, Houston, to El Paso, is 750 miles. (For context, it’s 637 miles from…

Fort Worth and Texas said good-bye last year to one of its favorite authors, native son Gary Cartwright (left). Along with fellow Fort Worth authors Dan Jenkins and the late Bud Shrake (in the photo at left with Cartwright, far right), Cartwright embodied an era of hard-charging, hard-writing sports reporters who later became novelists. He…

It’s not often that a city gets to celebrate a 300th birthday. Even less often that it receives, as a gift, a landmark book to mark the occasion, or that it it hosts a single-day book festival featuring nearly 100 authors. And hey, they’ve invited everybody to the party. For those reasons (and a few…

The Permian Basin is taking center stage in the Texas literary world this year with a native son’s new memoir. Bryan Mealer’s The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream (Flatiron Books, 2018) paints a vivid picture of pumpjacks, Pentecostals, and the Permian Basin. The detailed multigenerational saga…

Without doubt, the most long-awaited wish-list event for Dallas bookfans during the past twelve months was the opening, in May 2017, of a full-fledged independent bookstore the city can call its own. Interabang Books (left, and below, right), a new full-service, independent bookstore opened in May 2017. The 5,000-square-foot store, located at the southeast corner…

Houston is “on tap” to lead all of Texas’s cities in one literary travel criteria—the place with the most bookish bars. These wordish watering holes may be inspired by a title, an author, or an inscription, and H-town has them all, including the Mexican-inspired hideaway Under the Volcano, 2349 Bissonet, named after the Malcolm Lowry…