Articles

Chris Barton

An afternoon of mixing and matching is underway as dogs gleefully discover the qualities that make them similar. Some love to play with balls, others prefer chasing squirrels. Some like wet food, others prefer kibble. Some like to wear sweaters, others to destroy them. As endless Venn diagrams of connection are shaped and reshaped, the dogs find that they may have more in common than they think!

In this hilarious book for kids, New York Times-bestselling author Chris Barton introduces social emotional learning and math concepts in a fun comics-style picture book format. Humor and high-energy abound during an action-packed day at the dog park.

Jennifer L. Bristol

"I have personally trudged down hundreds of miles of trails in Texas, loaded down with gear, searching for birds, only to return to the parking lot to find what I was looking for," reflects author Jennifer L. Bristol. Drawing on her experience as a former park ranger and lifelong nature enthusiast, Bristol explores ninety Texas birding locations that are open to the public and accessible regardless of ability or mobility. Organized geographically, Parking Lot Birding: A Fun Guide to Discovering Birds in Texas guides readers to birds in locales from the busy heart of Dallas to the remote Muleshoe Wildlife Refuge in the plains north of Lubbock, speaking to those who desire to observe a wide variety of birds in locations that don't require arduous hikes or a degree in ornithology.

Callie Collins

It's 1975 in Austin, and the Rush Creek Saloon, five miles west of town, is a bar without a crowd. But when a strange new house band takes the stage, the hippies roll in and the good ole boys find their way back. Told in a trio of voices—a guitarist chasing what may be his last shot at success; a bar owner trying to see a future in her lifeless marriage; and a young kid from East Texas desperate for kinship, or at least something to take the damn edge off—Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine delivers a riotous love song to an enigmatic city. In her heartfelt, shimmering rockabilly ode to a place in a permanent state of becoming, Callie Collins captures the roughhousing mood and paradoxical longings of the American psyche.

Fernando A. Flores

The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of its mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick’s pockets.

Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Proserpina and Neftalí. One of Three Rivers's last literate citizens, Neftalí hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalí's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities, Neftalí and Proserpina, with the help of a wounded Bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel tías, rise up to reclaim their city—and in the process, unlock Rivas's connection to Three Rivers itself. With his most ambitious book yet, acclaimed author Fernando A. Flores once again bends what fiction can do, in the process crafting a moving and unforgettable story of perseverance.

Stephen Harrigan

In 1917, in Fatima, Portugal, three shepherd children claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared before them and spoke the words, "Do not be afraid." Stephen Harrigan first heard the story of Our Lady of Fatima when he was a young boy attending a Catholic school in Texas in the 1950s, struggling to come to grips with a religion that simultaneously soothed and terrified him. The question of what actually happened in Fatima in the early part of the twentieth century—one of the most important and mysterious events in the church's history—captured his young imagination and has stayed with him ever since.

Sorrowful Mysteries is a detailed and extraordinarily compassionate examination of the phenomenon of Our Lady of Fatima, an attempt to unravel and put into perspective the lives of the three children, how this life-altering event changed them and the world they knew, and how it intersected with so many of the signal moments of the twentieth century. It is a sweeping story but also, at its heart, a very personal one about Harrigan's own relationship with Catholicism and his lifelong struggle to break free from a religion that in so many paradoxical ways shaped and defined him.

Emily Hunt Kivel

When did the ending begin? Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice. And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, Evie sets out in search of a home. A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel's Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero's journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a fun-house mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

Carrie R. Moore

In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. A preteen pregnant alongside her mother refuses to let convention dictate who she names as the father of her child. Centuries after slavery separated his ancestors, a native Texan tries to win over the love of his life, despite the grip of a family curse. A young deaconess, who falls for a new church member, wonders what it means when God stops speaking to her. And at the very end of the South as we know it, two sisters seek to escape North to freedom, to promises of a more stable climate. Artfully and precisely drawn, and steeped in place and history as it explores themes of belonging, inheritance, and deep intimacy, Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine how the past shapes our present―and how our present choices will echo for years to come.

Lucas Schaefer

Austin, Texas: It's the summer of 1998, and there's a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy's slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.

More than a decade later, Nathaniel's uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew's disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face. Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.