Texas Pages

Welcome back from what I hope was an enjoyable holiday.

I had hoped to post this before the big week, in honor of all of you headed to Grandma's house over the river and through the woods into West Texas or Oklahoma. It's from William Least Heat-Moon's highly enjoyable Roads to Quoz, which I have been moseying through. (Read our review here, or read about his appearance in Austin here.)

Mr. Heat-Moon has traveled more highways than most, and he has some choice observations about Texas vs. Oklahoma, as well as the experience of driving across those West Texas plains.

Of our neighbor to the north, he writes:

The online newsletter Publishers Lunch reports that Dallas resident Kathleen Kent, author of the best-selling The Heretic's Daughter, has sold her second book, again to Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown. It's called The Giant of Edgehill, and is a dramatic love story set during the English civil war and early colonial America.

When I interviewed Ms. Kent earlier this year, she talked a little about the new book, which is based on an ancestor of hers who was rumored to have been the executioner of England's Charles I before coming to America in the 1600s. PW doesn't give an ETA for Edgehill.

Here's our review and interview with Ms. Kent, if you want to catch up.

Fran Vick is well-known in literary circles as president of the Texas State Historical Association and the former president of the Texas Institute of Letters.

And now, she's known as the editor behind Literary Dallas, which is reviewed today in Guide Sunday and on GuideLive.

She answered a few questions about the anthology via e-mail.

What surprised you most in the compiling of this book?

How much material there was out there. I was still finding things after I turned in the already large manuscript. There are some Dallas writers who are not in here and should be and I apologize for that. I ran out of time and also out of space.

Did your opinion of Dallas as a literary town change during the process? How do you think Dallas stacks up, in a literary sense, against other Texas cities?

No. I already knew this was a literary town. You cannot live here and not know it. We have also sent many writers out of here that other cities and states claim, such as Billie Lee Brammer. He is known as an Austin writer and the subject of The Gay Place is Austin, but Oak Cliff produced him. He is a Dallas boy, born and raised and educated at the University of North Texas.

Here's an excerpt from Where The Line Bleeds, by Jesmyn Ward. It's provided courtesy of the publisher. The review appears in GuideLive.

In the car, Joshua plucked a waterlogged twig, limp as a shoestring, from Christophe's wet hair. Dunny drove slowly on the pebbled grey asphalt back roads to Bois Sauvage, encountering a house, a trailer, another car once every mile in the wilderness of woods, red dirt ditches, and stretches of swampy undergrowth. Joshua watched Dunny blow smoke from his mouth and attempt to pass the blunt he'd rolled on the river beach to Christophe. Christophe shook his head no. Shrugging and sucking on the blunt, Dunny turned the music up so Pastor Troy's voice rasped from the speakers, calling God and the Devil, conjuring angels and demons, and blasting them out. Christophe had taken off his shirt and lumped it into a wet ball in his lap. His bare feet, like Joshua's, were caked with sand.

This news has been reported elsewhere on the newspaper's site, but Mike Maza, a former colleague of mine, died Sunday after a two-year fight with lung cancer.

The official reason for mentioning him on the books blog is that he once had a nationally syndicated column on books, so if you're a regular reader of this blog, perhaps you were familiar with his work.

But the real reason for mentioning him here is that he was an intelligent, classy, graceful guy. His calm, dedicated leadership at the newspaper enriched the arts scene in Dallas in many ways. We'll miss him. To say the least.

His full obituary can be read here.

NEW YORK (AP) -- First lady Laura Bush confirmed to The Associated Press that she is planning a memoir and has met with publishers.

"I've been talking to some publishers, but nothing has happened yet - just a few visits," she said in a telephone interview to discuss her upcoming special about the White House on cable's History channel.

A former schoolteacher known as a passionate reader, Mrs. Bush collaborated with her daughter, Jenna Hager, on a children's book published last spring.

Author Bob Mayer will be headlining the DFW Writers Conference May 2-3 at the Grapevine Convention Center in Grapevine. Literary agents Uwe Stender, Gina Panettieri, Al Longden, Sally Harding and Doris Booth are also scheduled to attend.

You can find more details and register here.

NEW YORK (AP) -- With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement that "more people everyday are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books."

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher's Insight browsing service.

Random House's vice president for digital operations, Matt Shatz, says e-book sales have increased by triple digit percentages in 2008, thanks in part to Amazon.com's Kindle reader, but he declined to offer specific number. E-books remain a tiny part of the overall market, widely estimated in the industry at 1 percent or less.

You can read an excerpt from Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed, which is reviewed today in Guide Sunday and on Guidelive.com, at the HarperCollins Web site.

Here's a look at books you'll be able to read about in Guide Sunday and on Guidelive.com:

Wally Lamb returns with The Hour I First Believed.

Robert J. Conley offers his Cherokee Thoughts, Honest and Uncensored.

Two books explore Andrew Jackson and his times: Jon Meacham's American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and David S. Reynolds' Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.

Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a novel that bends genres.

Plus, Si Dunn looks at books from Texas and the Southwest.

See you Sunday.

The Texas contingent fared well at the National Book Awards tonight, with awards going to both Annette Gordon-Reed and Mark Doty. Here's the full report from The Associated Press:

NEW YORK -- Judges for the National Book Awards honored a comeback Wednesday night, giving the fiction award to Peter Matthiessen's "The Shadow Country," a revision of a trilogy of novels from the 1990s. The 81-year-old author last won a National Book Award 30 years ago.
Other winners were Annette Gordon-Reed in nonfiction, for "The Hemingses of Monticello"; Mark Doty's "Fire to Fire" in poetry; and former genre writer-for-hire Judy Blundell in young people's literature, for "What I Saw and How I Lied."
Publishers, who were paying as much as $25,000 for a table even as they worried about sales, dined on baked taglioni and roast filet of beef at a literary celebration held under the 70-foot ceiling and Wedgwood dome of Cipriani on Wall Street, a setting unlikely for literature or celebrating.

With the awards ceremony just a few hours away, here's our look at authors and poets with Texas ties: Annette Gordon-Reed, Kathi Appelt, Reginald Gibbons and Mark Doty.

Check back later this evening for a list of winners.

A woman in Oregon has named her baby Powell, after her favorite bookstore, Powell's Books, Shelf Awareness reports.

I don't foresee an explosion of children being named Legacy, Borders or Barnes in Dallas.

But "Amazon Costco" would make a great name for a hero in an adventure novel.

And if you're considering any of those, let us know.

(On a tangent -- is there a literary story behind your name, or your child's? Long ago, I knew someone who named their baby "Conor Cruise" after writer Conor Cruise O'Brien. Which I thought was the coolest name a baby could hope for. Until that whole TomKat-Kidman-whatever thing ruined it. (Nothing against the kid -- he's kinda cute, isn't he?) )

At the Texas Book Festival earlier this month, UT-Austin's H.W. Brands noted that he undertook a biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (pictured) because he was anticipating a Hillary Clinton presidency. The historian thought the timing would be right for a look at the Roosevelts, perhaps America's most powerful of all power couples.

His election prediction was a bit off. But his timing was pretty good anyhow.

His critically praised book, A Traitor to His Class, (read our review here) now stands to benefit from a surge of interest sparked by that most influential of political book club president-elects, Barack Obama. Or so says galleycat, which notes that his mention of interest in two FDR titles sparked a run at bookstores.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly mentioned another presidential book, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, as being influential. The 2005 book has since crept into Amazon.com's Top 20. (As of this writing, it is No. 13.)

(File photo)

The timing of this event was up in the air, but former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is now scheduled to sign Do the Right Thing 7 p.m. Saturday at the Borders, Preston Road at Royal Lane. Details here.

David Sedaris fans who are not members of the Dallas Museum of Art or KERA might wish to sign up quickly.

The DMA announced today that he'll be appearing 7:30 p.m. April 19 at McFarlin Auditorium in a benefit for the Kay Cattarulla Endowment for the Literary & Performing Arts.

Tickets for the general public will go on sale at noon Dec. 3. But members can start buying them tomorrow. Details will be posted at DallasMuseumofArt.org/ALL.

Here's what you'll find this week in Guide Sunday and on GuideLive.com:

Delta Blues, a musical history lesson from Plano's Ted Gioia.

A Mercy, Toni Morrison's latest novel.

Means of Transit, a memoir by Oklahoma's Teresa Miller.

Nov. 22, 1963, a novel about the darkest day in Dallas' history, by Adam Braver.

Traitor To His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H. W. Brands of the University of Texas at Austin.

The Dallas literati were out in force last night to help launch one of the biggest local books of the year: Literary Dallas, from TCU Press.

How big? Well, at 493 pages, it's a hundred pages over budget, I am told.

But with that space, editor Frances Vick has cataloged a "who's who of Dallas writers," as one attendee put it. Among the contributors in attendance to sign copies at the private North Dallas gathering were Skip Hollandsworth, Harry Hunsicker (pictured below), Darwin Payne, Marshall Terry and Jane Roberts Wood.

Also there swapping stories were many names that will be familiar to readers of the book pages: Bob Compton, Isabel Nathaniel, Clay Reynolds and Bryan Woolley.

The book promises "to assemble the work of Dallas' finest writers who look at the city's history, its arts, commerce and personalities," TCU Press says.

We'll have more about the book in days to come. You can watch for it at your favorite bookseller in the meanwhile.

More from Nancy Churnin:

When a 15-year-old girl and boy try to solve two kidnappings in Frank McMillan's Cezanne is Missing, they find clues mingled with the stories of two Holocaust survivors and an adventure that involves an old European diary, New York museums, Grand Central Station and a tense chase down 5th Avenue.

Mr. McMillan will talk about his book and do a signing as part of a free event at the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance on Nov.16. There will be a free mini-workshop afterwards for teachers interested in using this book in their Holocaust curriculum.

(Nov.16 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. for the talk and book signing, 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. for the mini-workshop for teachers. Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance, 211 N. Record St. Suite 100. Free for both. Teachers interested in the mini-workshop can e-mail kchapman@dallasholocaustmuseum.org. 214-741-7500, extension 104. www.dallasholocaustmuseum.org.)

From Nancy Churnin:

Ever wonder how Santa has been figuring out who has been naughty or nice all these years? Mother and daughter Carol Aebersold and Chanda Bell spill one of his secrets in their book, The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition. It seems he has his own Santa Intelligence Agency in the form of pixie-elves who visit homes and report back to the big guy nightly. Want more details on how Little Brother is watching? Ms Aebersold will meet fans and sign books at Toy's Unique on Nov.18. And for kids who don't mind cooperating with the information gathering process, each book comes with an elf that they can name and register at www.elfontheshelf.com.

(Nov.18 from 4 to 6 p.m. Toy's Unique, 5600 W. Lovers Lane. Free for the event, $29.95 for the book and elf. 214-956-8697.)