Contributing Editor

FICTION

Barbara Taylor Sissel

What Lies Below

Lake Union Publishing

Paperback, 978-1-503-95011-5 (also available in e-book and audiobook formats), 334 pages, $14.95

May 15, 2018

Texas writer Barbara Taylor Sissel’s new novel, her ninth, is a tense, engrossing tale of abduction. It’s also a story in which secrets are held close by key characters as they help search for a missing child.

In a small Central Texas town named Wyatt, Zoe Halstead, not quite four, suddenly has disappeared from her daycare facility, and the local police and numerous townspeople have rallied to try to help Jake, a single father, find Zoe and bring her home.

The trouble is, as one police officer puts it: “Something like this—when it involves a child—everyone’s a suspect, you know. Friends, family members. Everybody in this town is looking at everybody else.” He is only partially right. Amid the suspense, suspicions, and fear, some of the friends and family members want no one to uncover certain conflicts, relationships, and failings within their lives.  >>READ MORE

Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole

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6.3.2018  Two Texas books gain national attention

Two best-selling Austin authors have penned new books about Texas that garnered glowing reviews this spring in national publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Lawrence Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, published God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95 hardcover).

Bryan Mealer, co-author of the 2009 best-seller The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, produced The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream (Flatiron Books, $27.99 hardcover).

God Save Texas is not so much a narrative with a storyline as it is a collection of insightful and entertaining personal essays or commentaries about Texas politics, oil, culture, music, cities, regions and politics. Did I mention politics?

“I’ve lived in Texas most of my life,” Wright says, “and I’ve come to appreciate what the state symbolizes, both to people who live here and to those who view it from afar.

“Texans see themselves as confident, hardworking, and neurosis free. Outsiders view Texas as … a place where rambunctious and disavowed impulses run wild.

“Indeed, it’s an irony that the figure who most embodies the values people associate with the state is a narcissistic Manhattan billionaire now sitting in the Oval Office.”

Wright sees the state as something of a microcosm of America, blending “the South, the West, the plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between the rural areas and the cities,” so what happens in Texas “tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation.”

In that regard, he writes, “I think Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation.”

Bryan Mealer’s The Kings of Big Spring deals with the economic and spiritual ups and downs of four generations of his Texas family.

Much of the story revolves around his father’s decision in 1981, at age twenty-seven, to move from Alvin, Texas, back to Big Spring to join his flamboyant childhood friend Grady Cunningham in the oil business.

One night Grady called and asked, “How’d you like to be a millionaire?” For Bryan’s dad, it was an easy decision — and one he would soon regret.

For a while, the Mealer family lived the high life in Big Spring as oil prices soared. Then, of course, came the bust.

Along the way, through four generations, Mealer writes, “there was love and heartbreak, sin and redemption, small victories and unbearable tragedy, and laughter when little else could save us. We drew our strength from the enduring power of our own flesh and blood.”

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

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. All year long we promote 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 2018’s #1 Top Bookish Destination. Where in this city celebrating its tricentennial this year would you find a colorful reading corner inside one of its hometown retailers?

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) went wanting for a winner. We’ll reveal the place now — it’s the Poet Tree, in Houston (yeah, that would’ve been easy, for anyone who zoomed in).