FICTION

Glen Larum

Waltz Against the Sky

Walking Three Bar T Publishing

Hardcover, 978-0-9966865-0-1, 400 pages; $28.95; 2016

As you open Austin and Midland writer Glen Larum’s debut novel, get ready for a dance with characters who are caught in swirls of life’s randomness, its chance convergences, and their own spur-of-the-moment decisions.

     Waltz Against the Sky has echoes of mysteries by such writers as Tony Hillerman and Elmore Leonard. But Larum also has his own style, and he’s good at building tension and suspense within seemingly commonplace moments and everyday encounters.

     What you do get in this 399-page book is a fast foxtrot of familiar actions and conventional plot.

      Larum’s novel is set mostly in a small, fictional West Texas town known as Indian Springs. (Yes, the Lone Star State has at least two communities—one in Southeast Texas and one near San Antonio—that call themselves Indian Springs.) Waltz Against the Sky takes place in a town where five highways converge. >>READ MORE

Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole

>> archive

Texas cookbooks appeal to wide range of taste buds

Every year Texas chefs produce mouth-watering cookbooks, and four have come across my desk already in 2018. They are:

Hard Core Carnivore: Cook Meat Like You Mean It by Jess Pryles (Surrey Books, $29.95 flexbound).

The Austin Cookbook: Recipes and Stories from Deep in the Heart of Texas by Paula Forbes (Abrams Books, $29.95 hardcover).

Paulie’s: Classic Italian Cooking in the Heart of Houston’s Montrose District by Paul Petronella (Greenleaf, $27.95 hardcover).

The Ultimate Tortilla Press Cookbook by Dotty Griffith (Harvard Common Press, $24.99 paperback).

As the title of her book suggests, Jess Pryles focuses on cooking meat, with plenty of recipes for chicken, game, pork, lamb, beef, and sides. Her own personal favorite, she admits, is beef.

Pryles, who was born in Australia, now makes her home in Austin. She said she “used to be intimidated by the idea of cooking meat,” and so she set out to change that, visiting ranches, butcher shops, and other locales to learn about meat. “Put simply,” she writes, “I’m a meat nerd, and now I get to share both my discoveries and recipes with you.”

A few entrees from the beef chapter: the perfect steak, twice-cooked cola short ribs, chicken fried steak, the steakhouse burger, beef hand pies, and chile-crusted roast beef.

Paula Forbes, a food and restaurant writer in Austin, devotes chapters in her Austin cookbook to barbecue, tacos, Tex-Mex, Texas standards, new Austin classics, breakfast and brunch, drinks, sweets, and salsas, sauces and chilis.

“The dishes in this cookbook,” she writes, “come from some of the great Austin restaurants. In fact, in many ways this book doubles as a restaurant guide.” She said she personally tested the recipes in her own home kitchen to make sure they could be reproduced at home, but she notes that “while many of the recipes are easy enough for beginners, this isn’t really intended to be a book full of quick weeknight meals.”

Just a few examples: chicken tinga, from Jack Allen’s Kitchen; 24 hash, from 24 Diner; sweet potato nachos, from Odd Duck; the fried chicken from Lucy’s Fried Chicken, and chicken fried steak with cream gravy from the Broken Spoke.

Paul Petronella includes recipes for a number of Italian-American dishes and desserts but also tells the story of operating a family business.

“The biggest myth is that owners of small businesses are sitting on piles of money,” he writes. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. Small business owners should know how much money is going out and how much is coming in at all times. In most cases, inexperienced restaurateurs don’t account for all the costs that restaurants incur to operate in the long term.”

Most of the book consists of recipes for such fare as fettuccini scampi, rigatoni Bolognese, eggplant parmigiana, citrus asparagus, and key lime pie, interspersed with Petronella’s experience of operating Paulie’s for twenty years.

Dotty Griffith, longtime Dallas food journalist and author, provides 125 recipes for burritos, enchiladas, tacos, fajitas, soups, and desserts.

The first section of the book is about basics: tortillas and how to make them. But whether you make them yourself or just buy them at the grocery or tortilleria, Griffith offers plenty of tasty ways to use them.

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Glenn Dromgoole writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life

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2018 TEXAS BOOKISH DESTINATIONS

Can you name this literary place in the Lone Star State?

Admit it: bookfans love traveling almost as much as they love reading itself. Beginning March 4, 2018, Lone Star Literary Life will roll out #10 through #6 in our annual list of Top Texas Bookish Destinations, for readers who want to visit the settings of their favorite books, the birthplaces and haunts of favorite authors, and hot spots for book buying, readings, and other literary activity.

     But throughout Texas’s 268,597 square miles, there are also lots of out-of-the-way points of interest that we don’t always have space to cover in our Top Ten pages.

     Watch this space each week for a new bookish place that you’ll want to add to your own travel list. Be the first to email us with the correct identification, and win a prize!

     This week, we continue with a bookish place that’s located in 2017’s #2 Top Bookish Destination. There’s plenty of poetry in this literary-rich city, but there’s a Poet Tree, too. Can you name the city? And extra credit for telling our readers the neighborhood or street where they can find it, too.

Email us at info@LoneStarLiterary.com with the specific right answer, and we’ll send you a free copy of Literary Texas.

LAST MONTH’S PHOTO (below) was correctly identified as the Capitol Gift Shop, inside the state capitol building in Austin. Congratulations — your prize is on the way!