Lone Star ReviewsMichelle Newby, NBCC,

Contributing Editor

MEMOIR/CRITICISM

Robert Lopez Flynn

Holy Literary License: The Almighty Chooses Fallible Mortals to Write, Edit, and Translate GodStory

Wings Press

Paperback, 978-1-6094-0465-9, 258 pgs., $16.95 (also available as an e-book); October 1, 2016

Reviewed by James R. Dennis

Robert Flynn is a fine storyteller. His new book, Holy Literary License: The Almighty Chooses Fallible Mortals to Write, Edit, and Translate GodStory, places that gift on display in a remarkable way.

This book offers us an intimate glimpse into Flynn’s relationship with the Bible, a lifelong relationship dating back to Flynn’s first Bible, given to him when he was a boy of nine. To be sure, however, this book is not an academic work of biblical scholarship; it neither professes nor pretends to be one. Rather, it is a kind of memoir of a life lived against a scriptural and literary background. >>READ MORE

Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole

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Author Max Lucado tells why he loves Christmas

Best-selling San Antonio author and minister Max Lucado gets right to the point in his new book, Because of Bethlehem: Love Is Born, Hope Is Here (Thomas Nelson, $19.99 hardcover). “I love Christmas” are the first three words on the page.

Lucado says he enjoys the season’s merriment, and even its secularization and hassles, “because somewhere someone will ask the Christmas questions: What’s the big deal about the baby in the manger? Who was he? What does his birth have to do with me?” In twelve easy-to-read chapters, or essays or maybe homilies, Lucado addresses the Christmas questions, beginning with “I Love Christmas” and ending with “Every Day a Christmas, Every Heart a Manger.”

If you need a last-minute book for someone on your Christmas list, here’s one that gets to the heart of why we celebrate Christmas in the first place.

Poster: I left out an important point last week in my mention of the new Simone Biles hardback autobiography, Courage to Soar. Remove the book jacket, unfold it, and turn it over, and it becomes a full-color poster of the Olympic gymnast. Pretty cool.

Fonda San Miguel: A gorgeous new, updated edition of a popular, lavish Texas cookbook has been published by the University of Texas Press. Fonda San Miguel: Forty Years of Food and Art by Tom Gilliland and Miguel Ravago ($39.95 hardcover) includes more than a hundred recipes, accompanied by mouth-watering color photographs, from the upscale Fonda San Miguel restaurant in Austin.

Whether you like to try new recipes or just read about them and savor the flavor in your mind, Fonda San Miguel is a culinary treat.

War stories: Texas A&M University Press offers two new hardback volumes of war stories. Texas Aggies in Vietnam: War Stories edited by Michael Lee Lanning ($30), includes 68 stories told by Aggie veterans of the Vietnam War. Most of the pieces are just two or three pages, but one of the most moving is a thirty-six-page collection of poems and letters from Joe Bush Jr., Class of 1966, who was killed in action.

Lanning lists the 106 Aggies who were killed in the Vietnam War as well as another eighty-three who died in uniform during the Vietnam era but were not in the actual war zone when they died.

To Bataan and Back: The World War II Diary of Major Thomas Dooley, edited and transcribed by Jerry C. Cooper ($30), traces Dooley’s personal experiences and reflections throughout the war based on six journals he compiled, beginning the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Dooley, A&M Class of 1935, was an aide-de-camp to Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright and spent most of the war in Japanese prison camps after the fall of Corregidor May 5–6, 1942. Dooley helped organize the Aggie Muster Roll Call two weeks earlier on the besieged island.

Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

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

LONE STAR LISTENS interviews >> archive

Kay Ellington, Editor and Publisher

12.18.2016 Mike Cox, one of the Lone Star State’s most prolific writers, on habit, history, and what he’d ask O. Henry

Mike Cox writes books, reads books, reviews books, and sells books. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and has written more than thirty books—with a special emphasis on Texana, particularly the Texas Rangers. He has a new title coming out in 2017 about the history of the Texas Capitol, just in time for the legislative session.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: You were born in Amarillo, Mike, but were raised in Austin. How do you suppose those two factors influenced your writing?

MIKE COX: Though born in Amarillo, I have spent most of my life in Austin. (However, last April I fled the city for Wimberley, which I love.) But Amarillo is important to me because that’s where my dad spent most of his newspaper career. He helped me get my first assignment for a story published by one of the long-defunct fact detective magazines — since replaced by TV shows like Dateline. I spent time in Amarillo during the summers and holidays and consider it my co-hometown along with Austin.

You’re a third-generation journalist, but when did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I think by the time I was in the fourth grade, I knew I wanted to be a newspaperman like my granddad, who was vastly influential in my life and career. A year later, in the fifth grade, I decided to write a history of Austin. I still have that one or two handwritten pages of Austin history, which reads suspiciously like the history of Austin that used to be published in the old Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. directories. >>READ MORE

Texas’s only statewide, weekly calendar of book events

Bookish Texas event highlights 12.18.2016
>> GO this week Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor

SAN ANTONIO Sun., Dec. 18 The Twig Book Shop, Linda Davis will read and sign A Christmas to Remember, 11AM; April Lynn Newell will read and sign The Reconciling, 2PMDALLAS Mon., Dec. 19 Dozen Street, Haiku Challenge with Ellie Francis Douglass + open mic, 7PMFORT WORTH Tues., Dec. 20 The Dock Bookshop, Fort Worth Poetry Slam and Open Mic, 8PMDALLAS Wed., Dec. 21, Lucky Dog Books – Oak Cliff, Figures of Speak: Open Mic Storytelling, 7PMAUSTIN Thurs., Dec, 22, Malvern Books, launch of Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s debut poetry collection, Images of Radical Politics, with readings from Vanessa, Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Ryan Bender Murphy, and Kimberly Lambright, 7PMBEDFORD Thurs., Dec. 22, Half Price Books, local author and actor Kody Christiansen will discuss, sell, and sign his inspiring memoir *Hollywood Heartbreak/New York Dreams*, 6PMSaturday, December 24 HAPPY HANNUKAH — Enjoy a good read during this season of lightSunday, December 25 MERRY CHRISTMAS! — Give a Texas book as a gift to someone today

Visit our annual catalog of great Texas reads in these gift categories!

News Briefs 12.18.16

LSLL editors, readers weigh in on this year’s favorite fiction selections

As we prepare to bid good-bye to 2016, the editors of Lone Star Literary Life would like to say thank you to all of the authors who have written books about our state or set in our state, but we’d like pay special recognition to our Favorite Texas Fiction of 2016.

This year’s selections reflect the diversity, tastes, and range of the state and its readers, from middle-grades and YA to fans of historical fiction, suspense, and western books. Here’s our list, in no particular order, with publishers’ descriptions and links to Lone Star Literary Life’s reviews and interviews. >>READ MORE

Writers Resist events slated for Jan. 15, 2017, in three Texas cities

Writers Resist, a literary collective born of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election that publishes creative expressions of resistance by diverse writers and artists, has prompted the grass-roots organization of events around the nation, including those organized in Austin, Houston, And San Antonio for Sun., Jan. 15. >>READ MORE

Texas independent booksellers receive Patterson holiday bonuses

Five independent booksellers from Texas were recognized with James Patterson Holiday bonuses.

On Thursday, Dec. 15, author James Patterson announced the names of 149 independent booksellers receiving grants totaling $250,000 as part of his Holiday Bookstore Bonus Program. Patterson partnered with the American Booksellers Association to distribute the funds, which were awarded to individual booksellers in amounts ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. >>READ MORE

Three Texas titles in PEN America longlist nominees

PEN America has announced longlists for its 2017 literary awards. Among the nominees are a three titles with Texas connections.

The Train to the Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II, by Jan Jarboe Russell, is in the running for the $10,000 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

>>READ MORE

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