Welcome to the second-annual (Mostly) Texas Books Issue, an endeavor begun in the spring of 2005 to encourage you to spend some of your summer-reading time with the Lone Star State’s wide array of literary offerings. What you’ll find in this section is a sampler plate designed to whet your appetite for mysteries that go well with sweet tea and a long nap; historical revisionism in corsets and Army boots; eccentric personalities to rival Tennessee Williams; and DIY writers with more huevos than punctuation. If it isn’t puro Tejano, it carries the Tex-Mex spirit, like Daniel Pinchbeck’s hallucinogenic and transcendent 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and Peter Carey’s unblinkered take on the larceny of the human soul. You won’t find local favorites David Liss and Rick Riordan, who’ve had their share of print in this year’s pages, but you might discover a secret new passion, like driving a motorhome across the continental U.S., collecting makeup samples from high-end department stores, fighting the neo-con plan to steal the next election, or reading J. Frank Dobie’s notebooks. Whatever your literary love, we encourage you to pursue it further with Texas’s many outstanding independent presses, from the local Maverick and Wings, to the University of Texas’s press, and El Paso’s Cinco Puntos. And don’t forget the suntan lotion!
This article appears in May 24-30, 2006.