LONE STAR LISTENS interviews   >> archive

Kay Ellington, Editor and Publisher

7.31.2016  Austin writer (& Houston native) Amy Gentry arrives with Good As Gone

Debut novelist Amy Gentry spent years as a book reviewerfor the Chicago Tribune,Los Angeles Book Review, Texas Observer, among other outlets. But now the tables are turned and she has “gone” from reviewer to reviewee with her new novel Good As Gone(out this week from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a psychological thriller that has been compared to best sellers such as Gone GirlThe Girl on the Train. We caught up with her via email during the book’s launch week amid a dozen appearances and interviews. She graciously answered our email interview questions within hours of our hitting Send.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Amy, I understand you grew up in Houston, and your novel is set in the city. What was the Houston of your youth like, and how did it inform your writing?

AMY GENTRY: I grew up in West Houston for the most part, around what’s now called the Energy Corridor, and that’s where most of the book takes place. Like Jane in the book, I escaped to Montrose and Rice Village in high school to feel more cool and less suburban. But of course, we could do that because we all had access to cars, and what’s more suburban than that? When I think of Houston, I think of this flattened-out, cluttered urban landscape with all these dingy strip malls and gleaming skyscrapers just thrown together because of the minimal zoning laws, and the huge, arching highways providing the only relief from the flatness. I think it’s the most beautiful ugly city in the world. A perfect place to get lost in, or lose your identity.  >>READ MORE

Texas’s only statewide, weekly calendar of book events

Bookish Texas event highlights  7.31.2016
>> GO this week   Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor

Remembering the Tower Shootings: Recommended Readings

Nonfiction and fiction links >>READ MORE

AUGUST 1, 2016

Remembering the Tower Shootings,
Fifty Years Later

special to Lone Star Literary Life by Dave Parsons, 2011 Poet Laureate of Texas

It seemed like any predictable first of August in Austin, Texas: sunny and hot. I left my summer class in European History in the General Academics Building next to the University of Texas Tower forty minutes before the day would suddenly become infamous in the minds and hearts of the citizens of the United States: walking directly under and by the Tower to my car. >>READ MORE

Austin Fire by Dave Parsons

Memories from the day of the University of Texas Tower shootings

& the 100th anniversary of Scholz’s Beer Garden on August 1, 1966.

Out of the cave

of European History class

I am struck

by squinting bright skies

strolling on the edge of the shadow

of the university tower shade

through the southeast campus quad

flip flopping to my Mustang

for my short drive to work

less than an hour before

student victim #1

will have fallen

in that very path.

I am traveling back now—

back to the pool—

down the hot tar entry

down the pebbled walkway

to Barton Springs

churning shadowy deep blue—

it’s the blues—the gushing

blues 68 degrees year-round

offering a deadening numbness

making the youngest of skin

cadaver cold and this ordinary

workday, I am just another Life-

guard cut loose too soon.

And now—again

I am driving back

again back and away

away from the many

oblique precipices—falls

hidden undercurrents

jutting stones in the blinds

of the limestone aquifer

traveling back under and through

the towering pecan trees

just a short dash—and now again

Barton Springs Road—

The Rolling Stones—Can’t Get No

Satisfaction…. everything

is heating up the day.

At Scholz’s Garden

another grand spring

100 years of beer flowing

unjudgmentally through

the many unruly seasons

through the untold

joyous and unfettered

the anonymous generations

of the deemed and the damned

and all their wagging

Did you know(s)…flying

around the ever blank

pages of air—air that receives, never

recording a single loving or gnashing word

of the produce of this imperfect garden

those sweaty hound dog days—I feel

that very air here again now—the gamey

smells of the Dutchman’s beer garden

the care free summer women

laughing braless in loose tie-dyes

swilling nickel Lone Stars

aiming flirtatious glances

then firing their deadly frank stares

swinging suntanned legs

to the juke box beats

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man

play a song for me…all

positioned between

the two towers: the capitol dome

topped with Lady Liberty

and UT’s apex and bastille of education

and there now…and again—white puffs—

Sniper! Sniper!

Girls first! diving under

stone gray concrete tables

towering turquoise sky

ragged clouds

ripping the battle blue

drifting…mist like…hiding

momentarily gun site portals,

and our shade tree bunkers

fiery memories

imbedded

like so many stray shots—

He was a crew cut

every mother’s son

Boy Scout—Marine

sharpshooter

again all paths of mine—

In his last note to the world

Charles Whitman

requested an autopsy

with special consideration

to his brain…they found

a tiny, cloudy gray mass

of malignant tissue lined

in crimson—seems it’s

always the smallest of embers.

First appeared in Color of Mourning, Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press Consortium. Published with permission of the author.  >>READ MORE

News Briefs 7.31.16

Writers’ League announces 2015 book awards

The Writers’ League of Texas recently announced winners, finalists, and Discovery Award winners of its annual book awards competition. >>READ MORE