Lone Star ReviewsMichelle Newby, NBCC,
Contributing Editor
Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
>> archiveCookbook features healthier Mexican cuisine
Lubbock food writer Angelina LaRue has produced a wonderful full-color cookbook, The Whole Enchilada: Fresh and Nutritious Southwestern Cuisine (Pelican, $27.95 hardcover). LaRue includes about a hundred Tex-Mex and Southwestern recipes, and nearly half of them are accompanied by compelling color photos. Several even have step-by-step illustrations. The author says Mexican food “can often get a bad rap for being calorie-packed, cheese-heavy meals,” and some of her recipes do fall into that category.
“But,” she adds, “the majority of recipes that make up the book will allow you to pair loads of colorful fruits and vegetables with healthy protein for scrumptious meals you can enjoy every day.”
A few of the ones that especially caught my eye were shrimp ceviche shooters, fresh fiesta salad, green chile chicken enchiladas, and migas. Pass the grilled avocado salsa, please!
Ransom Canyon: Best-selling Amarillo novelist Jodi Thomas has two more books in her West Texas-based Ransom Canyon series out already this year, with another one due in August.
Rustler’s Moon (HQN books, $7.99 paperback) was published in January, with Lone Heart Pass hitting bookshelves in April. They are the second and third novels in the series, which began last summer with Ransom Canyon. The fourth book, Sunrise Crossing, is scheduled for release on Aug. 30.
Thomas’s books are considered in the romance genre, but they are really just good, strong, fast-moving and uplifting tales that can be enjoyed by men as well as women.
I zipped through Rustler’s Moon, featuring a museum curator who gets death threats, and I look forward to picking up Lone Heart Pass soon. Check out Jodi’s website, jodithomas.com.
Preacher’s home: Original Cyn by Sylvia Dickey Smith (White Bird Publications, $18.99 paperback) is a novel about a Baptist preacher, the Rev. Wilburn Carter, and his wife, Cynthia, who prefers her nickname “Cyn,” but that’s just not a name Wilburn can bring himself to call her, for obvious reasons.
Wilburn is driven to build a bigger church and make a name for himself in the state denomination, but Cyn is feeling there should be more to life than trying to please him and the ladies of the church. And, then, just as Cyn is working up the nerve to stand up for herself, she is stunned when a deep, dark secret manifests itself and plunges the church and the Carter family into chaos.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a preacher’s home, but I couldn’t put this one down. I started reading it one evening and finished it the next day. About 120 pages into the book comes the shocking scene that changes everything.
Smith, who lives near Austin, is a former pastor’s wife herself. Read about her and her other books at sylviadickeysmith.com.
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Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is More Civility, Please. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Lit
UPCOMING CONFERENCES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Houston Writers Guild wraps up annual conference May 1
The 2016 Houston Writers Guild annual conference will be held April 29–May 1, 2016 at the Marriott Houston Westchase, 2900 Briarpark Drive, Houston, Texas 77042. Registration and event times vary each day.
Friday night, April 29, the HWG Press will hold a Book Launch/Cocktail Reception. Conference attendees will be entertained by guest speaker Jay Asher. Light hors d’oeuvres will be served along with cash bar. The main event on April 30 will begin with keynote speaker Jamie Ford, followed by one-hour breakout sessions. In addition, there will be an opportunity for writers to pitch their work, in ten-minute sessions with agents and editors. >>READ MORE
Dallas Book Festival,
Apr. 30, Expands With
Best-selling Novelists, Award Winners
Several nationally prominent authors — including best-selling novelists and winners of both a Pulitzer and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize — are headed to the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library for an expanded Dallas Book Festival.
Among those just announced for the free, all-day, April 30, 2016, event:
Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, which won the 2015 Dayton prize in nonfiction; Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower; Jessica Knoll, best-selling author of Luckiest Girl Alive; Historian/analyst Andrew Bacevich, who is about to release America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History; Adam Mansbach, famous for that picture book that is known in its polite form as Seriously, Just Go to Sleep; Ghostwriter to the stars David Ritz, whose books include Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, and Curtis Sittenfeld, the American Wife author who is about to release her newest book, Eligible, in April.
Local authors taking part will include Karen Blumenthal, Nancy Churnin, Tim Cowlishaw, AG Ford, Sarah Hepola, Don Tate and Merritt Tierce. >>READ MORE
LONE STAR LISTENS interviews >> archive
Kay Ellington, Editor and Publisher
5.1.2016 Leila Meacham, who “crashed into the back door of the party without meaning to and found myself invited to stay”
Leila Meacham has all but defined the historical Texas saga for the twenty-first century, with her 500-plus-page-count novels Roses, Tumbleweeds, Somerset, and her newest, Titans,released recently to huge acclaim. But even more significant may be that the San Antonio author has done this in her seventies, and at seventy-seven is already busy on her next novel. She spoke with Lone Star Lit last week via email.
LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: You grew up in small-town Wink, Texas. What was that like, and how do you think that background later informed your writing?
LEILA MEACHAM: Despite the sandstorms, desert (and deserted) landscape, and the appearance of hardscrabble living, my West Texas hometown was a magical place to grow up. Life revolved around school, community, and church activities, and oil-tax revenues paid for the best public education money could buy. It was a halcyon time before TV, video games, and smart phones, so we kids had to provide our own entertainments. These were played outside the house in a world beyond the living-room couch and required physical exercise and social interaction and imagination. Girls played games like jacks and pick-up sticks, hopscotch, jump-rope. With the boys, we played marbles, hide-and-seek, cowboys-and-Indians, and Annie-Annie Over, and built forts out of Christmas trees, flew kites, rode bikes, and built scooters out of wooden fruit crates. And of course there was reading, the favorite pastime of summer. >>READ MORE
Bookish Texas event highlights 5.1.2016
>> GO this week Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor
Mannoscript by Chris Manno
Chris Manno has been an airline pilot at American Airlines since 1985 and a captain since 1991, based at DFW Airport. His cartoons have been popular worldwide in aviation trade publications as well as in crew training materials for United, American, British Airways, and Lufthansa flight crews. He has also taught composition and rhetoric at Texas Wesleyan University and English and composition at Texas Christian University. He has a book of cartoons, Flight Crew Like You (CreateSpace, 2014) and a new novel out, East Jesus (White Bird Publications, March 2016). We welcome him to the pages of Lone Star Literary Life.
News Briefs 5.1.2016
Tell us about your favorite Texas bookstore!
There are more than two hundred bookstores in the Lone Star State. Indies, large chains, speciality stores, used & rare, and more. (Check out our list here, on our Read page.)
What’s your favorite—and why?
If you’re an email newsletter subscriber, we’ll be sending you a ballot this week. If you’d like to vote—and you’re not a newsletter subscriber—simply send us your email at info@lonestarliterary.com
And tell us about your favorite bookstore, like this LSLL reader did this week: “Front Street Books, Alpine TX. Since 1994 this store has been the best! For a small town, it has plenty of new bestsellers, whether fiction, nonfiction, nature, or regional. And is has a used book section, too. Coffee, newspapers await the visitor. But watch it. A sign on the front door advises against talking on your cell phone.” —Vivian Morrow Jones
Bookish Texas travel: 
Visit Midland and feel
the energy
>>ALLY TALKS WITH
EDWARD McPHERSON and BRENDA KISSKO ABOUT LITERARY LIFE IN THE TALL CITY
WHERE IN TEXAS?
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NOW ON TOUR: TEXANA
How to be a Texan by Andrea Valdez
VISIT WITH ANDREA MAY 3–17, 2016
5/3 Country Girl Bookaholic — Promo
5/4 It’s a Jenn World — Review
5/5 Blogging for the Love of Authors and Their Books — Author Interview #1
5/6 Forgotten Winds — Review
5/7 StoreyBook Reviews — Excerpt #1
5/8 All for the Love of the Word – Page Preview #1
5/9 Book Chase — Review
5/10 Margie’s Must Reads — Guest Post
5/11 My Book Fix Blog — Author Interview #2
5/12 Books and Broomsticks — Review
5/13 The Crazy Booksellers — Page Preview #2
5/14 The Page Unbound — Promo
5/15 Hall Ways Blog — Review
5/16 Byers Editing Reviews & Blog — Promo
5/17 Missus Gonzo — Review
NOW ON TOUR: ROMANCE
Her One and Only by Becky Wade
VISIT WITH BECKY MAY 3–12, 2016
5/3 Because This is My Life Y’all — Review
5/4 My Book Fix Blog — Excerpt #1
5/5 Margie’s Must Reads — Review
5/6 The Page Unbound — Guest Post #1
5/7 Blogging for the Love of Authors and Their Books — Promo
5/8 Missus Gonzo – Review
5/9 Books and Broomsticks – Excerpt #2
5/10 StoreyBook Reviews — Promo
5/11 Hall Ways Blog — Review
5/12 It’s a Jenn World — Guest Post #2
NOW ON TOUR: INSPIRATION
Prayerful Passages by Jack H. Emmett
VISIT WITH JACK MAY 4–13, 2016
5/4 Missus Gonzo – Review
5/5 Books and Broomsticks — Author Interview #1
5/6 Hall Ways Blog – Review
5/7 It’s a Jenn World — Promo
5/8 My Book Fix Blog – Excerpt #1
5/9 Texas Book-aholic – Review
5/10 Book Crazy Gals – Author Interview #2
5/11 The Page Unbound – Excerpt #2
5/12 The Librarian Talks – Review
5/13 A Novel Reality — Author Interview #3
CONTINUING ON TOUR: FICTION
Truth in Patience by Beth Fehlbaum
VISIT WITH BETH THROUGH MAY 3, 2016
4/30 Because This is My Life Y’all — Guest Post
5/1 Texas Book-aholic — Review
5/2 Hall Ways Blog — Truth Excerpt
5/3 Blogging for the Love of Authors and Their Books – Review
RECENTLY ON TOUR: FICTION
Hell to Pay by Pamela Fagan Hutchins
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COMING SOON: Bookish Texas Classifieds
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Starting in fall 2015, we’ll help you find them in our online classifieds section. If you’re interested in advertising for pennies a day, contact ads@LoneStarLiterary.com to run your listing here.
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