In 2017, Huntsville artist Lee Jamison embarked on a trip with sketchbook in hand, recording his impressions and recollections of East Texas, a region he has called home for about 45 years. Having built a solid reputation as a respected Texas Regionalist painter, Jamison, with other collectors and observers of the Texas art scene, has become convinced that East Texas, while rich in natural beauty and historic interest, has typically been under-represented as a subject of serious artists. Landscapes and scenes of the Texas Hill Country and the Trans-Pecos abound in collections and galleries across the state, but East Texas, in Jamison’s view, has received short shrift. Seeking to remedy this lack of parity, the artist traveled the winding roads and tree-lined passages of East Texas for well over a year, observing, sketching, and journaling along the way. The result is an astonishing visual record of contemporary East Texas land, lore, and culture as viewed through the eyes of an accomplished painter. These fine works are further enriched by the artist’s poignant and insightful literary observations, providing backstories and personal accounts for each image. A thoughtful introduction by historian Carolina Castillo Crimm provides the ideal entry into Jamison’s loving treatment of the region’s vistas and stories. Exhibiting an unshakeable awareness of place and a poet’s sensibility, Lee Jamison’s Ode to East Texas stands as an affectionate hymn to a familiar region, an invitation to a new appreciation of its qualities. Collectors, students, and aficionados of Texas art will be grateful for this fresh examination of a region too long overlooked.
The "photo-realistic" paintings and drawings of Dennis Blagg reveals the rugged character and natural beauty of this geologically significant region of Texas. (Fine Arts)
When first-time author and artist Deborah Paris stepped into Lennox Woods, an old-growth southern hardwood forest in northeast Texas, she felt a disruption that was both spatial and temporal. Walking the remnants of an old wagon trail past ancient stands of pine, white oak, elm, hickory, sweetgum, maple, hornbeam, and red oak, she felt drawn into a reverie that took her back to “the beginning, both physically and metaphorically.” Painting the Woods: Nature, Memory and Metaphor explores the experience of landscape through the lens of art and art-making. It is a place-based meditation on nature, art, memory, and time, grounded in Paris’s experiences over the course of a year in Lennox Woods. Her account unfolds through the twin arcs of the changing seasons and her creative process as a landscape painter. In the tradition of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, narrative passages interweave with observations about the natural history of Lennox Woods, its flora and fauna, art history, the science of memory, Transcendentalist philosophy, the role of metaphor in creative work, and even loop quantum gravity theory. Each chapter explores a different aspect of the forest and a different step in the art-making process, illuminating our connection to the natural world through language, comprehension of time, and visual depictions of the landscape. The complex layers of the forest and Paris’s journey through it emerge as metaphors for the larger themes of the book, just as the natural world underpins the art-making drawn from it. Like the trail that winds through Lennox Woods, memory and time intertwine to provide a path for understanding nature, art, and our relationship to both.
"Brooklyn Noir came first in 2004, and now, 15 years later, Houston Noir--14 stories of intrigue, betrayal and death set from Tanglewood to Third Ward penned by current or former Houston authors--goes on sale." --Houston Chronicle "Akashic Books's long-running Noir Series tasks writers with imagining the dark sides of their communities, spinning gritty, shocking tales atop the local landscape. Recently the publisher tapped writer and former Houston poet laureate Gwendolyn Zepeda to serve as editor on a collection of stories about her native Bayou City. The end result is Houston Noir, out this month, whose 14 entries explore the murder, betrayal, and brujería lurking everywhere from River Oaks to the Ship Channel to a trailer park off FM 1960." --Houstonia Magazine "Houston is a city on the rise when it comes to crime fiction--something about all those lonely highways, gravity-defying overpasses, and drastic urban sprawl (and of course, the crime rate) make Houston a perfect setting for noir. This port city of close to five million residents is ready for a new reputation as a world capital of literature, and we're here to support Akashic's new collection of noir tales from Texas's most complex city." --CrimeReads, included in The Best New Crime Fiction of May 2019 "With sprawl and serial killers, Houston Noir packs a mean punch...Houston Noir is a welcome addition to the city's slowly filling bookcase." --Texas Observer "Editor Gwendolyn Zepeda has cannily divided the collection into four separate areas of the city, which only serves to multiply a reader's certainty: Like the sodden sheet covering a much-lacerated corpse, all of Houston is pretty much dripping with crime. Best to experience it, we suggest, only between the covers of this new paperback." --Austin Chronicle Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Tom Abrahams, Robert Boswell, Sarah Cortez, Anton DiSclafani, Stephanie Jaye Evans, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Adrienne Perry, Pia Pico, Reyes Ramirez, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Sehba Sarwar, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Larry Watts, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. From the introduction by Gwendolyn Zepeda: In a 2004 essay, Hunter S. Thompson described Houston as a "cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West--which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch." For what it's worth, that quote is now posted on a banner somewhere downtown and regularly, gleefully repeated by our local feature writers. Houston is a port city on top of a swamp and, yes, it has no zoning laws. And that means it's culturally diverse, internally incongruous, and ever-changing. At any intersection here, I might look out my car window and see a horse idly munching St. Augustine grass. And, within spitting distance of that horse, I might see a "spa" that's an obvious brothel, a house turned drug den, or a swiftly rising bayou that might overtake a car if the rain doesn't let up...Overall, this collection represents the very worst our city has to offer, for residents and visitors alike. But it also presents some of our best voices, veteran and emerging, to any reader lucky enough to pick up this book.
In this first comprehensive biography of Dr. Arthur Edward Spohn, authors Jane Clements Monday, Frances Brannen Vick, and Charles W. Monday Jr., MD, illuminate the remarkable nineteenth-century story of a trailblazing physician who helped to modernize the practice of medicine in Texas. Arthur Spohn was unusually innovative for the time and exceptionally dedicated to improving medical care. Among his many surgical innovations was the development of a specialized tourniquet for “bloodless operations” that was later adopted as a field instrument by militaries throughout the world. To this day, he holds the world record for the removal of the largest tumor—328 pounds—from a patient who fully recovered. Recognizing the need for modern medical care in South Texas, Spohn, with the help of Alice King, raised funds to open the first hospital in Corpus Christi. Today, his name and institutional legacy live on in the region through the Christus Spohn Health System, the largest hospital system in South Texas. This biography of a medical pioneer recreates for readers the medical, regional, and family worlds in which Spohn moved, making it an important contribution not only to the history of South Texas but also to the history of modern medicine.
In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.
In this collection of rare, hard-to-find, and often too-short short "stories", Guy J. Jackson wields his not particularly helpful but still relatively charming (at least compared to being chased) worldview in order to pretty much study and correct all of humanity's foibles, or at least the ones that need correcting by the end of this year. Also, if you read these "stories" at the rate of one per day, you'll feel Zen for however many days that there are "stories", or so claimed Roundfire Books' late editorial assistant, Nils Samuels Chastain, even though it wasn't his place to decide that.
David Everett wrote the way he played the piano for the sheer joy of entertaining. His stories are unfailingly funny. Everett's memoirs tell of growing up in east Texas during WWII, the military after Korea but before Viet Nam, gays at UT in the 50s, Winedale and Johnson City in the 60s, playing the piano behind the iron curtain in Europe, and much, much more. Diagnosed with Parkinson s at 45, Everett continued to enjoy life for another 28 years, first working on campus and then retiring to Mexico. This book tells in droll detail the story of the coming of age of a gay Texan, the pleasures and traumas of the 60s, the heroic struggles of an unrepentant iconoclast, beset with a degenerative disease, who faced the world with intelligence, sensitivity, and humor. This book is a song with many verses and a single underlying theme: art as a form of salvation, writing as a pure act of love.
Jerry Cline exists at the whim of an 1869 Comanche raiding party on his birthfather's family ranch in Central Texas. Jerry could also be a poster-boy for successful adoptions. He was adopted at age 3 months in 1939 by a hard-living couple from East Texas, via the Indian Territory of Oklahoma before it became a state. Despite the raw and dusty origins of his forbearers, Jerry grew up to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from Purdue University and enjoyed a long career in the aerospace industry with McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now The Boeing Company). He worked on several space and missile programs and was part of the team which developed the design for the Space Shuttle. Dr. Cline also held an academic appointment as an adjunct faculty member of the mathematics department of Washington University in St. Louis. Jerry is now retired and lives in St. Louis with his wife Phyllis. In 2001, aided by his wife, a cooperative adoption agency, and an expert genealogist, Jerry Cline began what turned out to be an exciting and successful quest for his birthparents and knowledge of how he came to be. He was 61 years old at the time. The search itself, the surprising identities of his birthparents, the heartwarming face-to-face meetings with new-found blood relatives and several years of research inspired this book. In Born and Raised, Jerry shares the details of his dramatic search and weaves a fascinating composite of the histories of his birthparents, his adoptive parents, their families, plus related events and personalities from America's past. Thanks to two books written long ago, one by his birthfather (a renowned lawman of the Old West), and one by an aunt, Jerry is able to provide a graphic and authentic glimpse into what life was like on America's frontier in the mid 19th century. Born and Raised is a classic tale of nature and nurture. That the stories in it are true makes the book all the more remarkable and appealing.
