Texas Pages

After we bravely slogged through e-mail problems yesterday, I finally connected with Southern Methodist University professor Willard Spiegelman, whose Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness was reviewed on Sunday.

Like any proud author, he was eager to experience the simple pleasure of getting more books into the hands of readers. But he seemed rightly happy that the book has received warm attention from the likes of Publishers Weekly (which called him "an intelligent, well-read and kindly soul,") and The Wall Street Journal ("Taken together, Mr. Spiegelman's essays amount to a kind of cubist memoir, catching the author from different angles. It is unexpectedly fascinating to read a memoir these days in which the author isn't a victim of anything.") I hear reports that it is selling well locally, too.

You can see him in person 7:30 p.m. May 14 at Legacy Books. To whet your appetite, an excerpt is attached below.

Here is the opening to The Color of Lightning, by Paulette Jiles, which is reviewed today in Guide Sunday and on GuideLive.com. The excerpt is provided by HarperCollins.

When they first came into the country it was wet and raining and if they had known of the droughts that lasted for seven years at a time they might never have stayed. They did not know what lay to the west. It seemed nobody did. Sky and grass and red earth as far as they could see. There were belts of trees in the river bottoms and the remains of old gardens where something had once been planted and harvested and then the fields abandoned. There was a stone circle at the crest of a low ridge.

Moses Johnson was a stubborn and secretive man who found statements in the minor prophets that spoke to him of the troubles of the present day. He came to decisions that could not be altered. He read aloud: Therefore thus saith the Lord: Ye have not harkened unto me in proclaiming liberty, every one to his own brother, and every man
to his neighbor. Behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine, and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth. That's in Jeremiah, he said. So they left Burkett's Station, Kentucky, in 1863 in four wagons, fifteen white people and five black including children, to get away
from the war between armies and also the undeclared war between
neighbors.

Britt Johnson was proud of his wife and he loved her and was deeply jealous of her because of her good looks and her singing voice and her unstinting talk and laughter. Her singing voice. All along their journey from Kentucky to north Texas he had been afraid for her. Afraid that some white man, or black, or Spaniard, would take a liking to her and he would have to kill him. He rode a gray saddle horse always within sight of the wagon that carried her and the children. She was as much of grace and beauty as he would ever get out of Kentucky.

The Corporal Was A Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie, by Ira Berkow, is part of the roundup of baseball books in today's newspaper and on GuideLive. Here's an excerpt, provided by Triumph Books.

In the killing fields, Brissie, along with many of his fellow soldiers, looked forward to receiving the Stars and Stripes, the armed forces newspaper. "And the first thing I'd do when I got the paper was to see if it had a Bill Mauldin cartoon," Brissie recalled. "Most of us did the same."
Brissie said that Mauldin, who became particularly known among the troops for his "Willie and Joe" renderings of disheveled but determined G.I.s, "brought the reality of the war, along with a much-needed sense of humor. He knew what it was like. We might be laughing at them as we sat in a water-filled foxhole with rain soaking the paper."
Indeed, Mauldin, in his early 20s but with the youthful face of a teenager, in his army fatigues and steel helmet and drawing pad, traveled with combat infantry troops as they battled their way from Northern Africa, into Sicily, Italy, and France.
Brissie recalled several cartoons that made an impact on him, including one with Willie and Joe, seated among scraggly weeds, helmeted, rifles at rest, unshaven, wearing boots, their feet in mud, and Willie's arm tenderly tossed around Joe's shoulder, with Joe looking morose. "Joe," read the caption, "yestiddy ya saved my life an' I swore I'd pay ya back. Here's my last pair o' dry socks."
Brissie recalled: "Yes, dry socks were a premium. If your feet were wet for an extended period of time, you could get trench foot. In real cold weather, your feet would freeze. It could virtually paralyze you. I never had it, but I saw guys who did. Mauldin caught that reality of guys on the front line. It struck a chord of the harshness of war, but at the same time he was able to bring a smile to your face. He was a great gift to the World War II G.I. He made life more tolerable for every one of us in combat."

Today on GuideLive.com, you''ll find a review of The Believers, by Zoë Heller. You can read samples from the book at the publisher's Web site.

We also have a review of Ruins, by Achy Obejas. Here's a YouTube video of the author reading from that work.

Here's an excerpt from Daemon, by Daniel Suarez. It's reviewed today on GuideLive and is provided courtesy of Dutton.

(Photo credit: Frank Buddenbrock)

From his vantage point at a coffeehouse, Brian Gragg gazed across the street at the darkened windows of a French provincial mansion. The lush River Oaks section of Houston's Inner Loop had more than a few of these aging beauties, restored and pressed into service as quaint professional buildings. They sheltered doctors' offices, architectural firms, law firms--and branch offices of East Coast stockbrokers. It was this last species of suburban tenant that attracted Gragg. They were the weakest link in a valuable chain.
One of the brokers there had installed a wireless access point in his office but failed to change the default password and SSID. Better yet, the broker couldn't be bothered to shut his machine off at night.
Gragg glanced down at his own laptop and adjusted a small Wi-Fi antenna to point more directly at the office windows. The broker's computer screen was displayed as a window on Gragg's laptop. Gragg had compromised the workstation days ago, first obtaining a network IP address from the router, and then gaining access to the broker's machine through the most basic of NetBIOS assaults. The ports on the workstation were wide open, and over the course of several evening visits to the café, Gragg had escalated his privileges. He now owned their local network. Clearing the router's log would erase any evidence that he had been there.
But all that was child's play compared to how he would use this exploit. In the past year, Gragg had evolved beyond simple credit card scams. He no longer prowled bars passing out portable magstripe readers to waiters and busboys and paying a bounty for each credit card number. Gragg now stole identities. His buddy, Heider, had schooled him on the intricacies of spear-phishing. It opened up a whole new world.
Gragg was using the broker's workstation to conduct an e-mail campaign to the firm's clientele. He had cribbed the phony marketing blather and graphics from the brokerage's own Web site, but what the e-mail said was irrelevant. Gragg's goal was that the phish merely view the message. That was all it took.

You'll find a review of Barry Unsworth's Land of Marvels on Guidelive.com today.

And you can find an excerpt from the book here.

Simon & Schuster has made a couple of excerpts from Simon Montefiore's Sashenka available online. You can find them here.

And you can read our review here.

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:

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.

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 an excerpt from David McGlynn's The End of the Straight and Narrow, which is reviewed today in Guide Sunday and on GuideLive.

The excerpt is provided courtesy of the author.

My sister Jill sat on the floor in front of the television, charting the storm on her hurricane-tracking map. Glenda had made it past Cancun and was projected to hit Galveston Island some time tomorrow. The weatherman paced back and forth in front of the satellite grid, the swirl of the hurricane like a cataract in the Gulf of Mexico. His outline was rimmed with a faint green light and each time he swept his hands across the map he showed us his wet pits. Watching him made Jill jumpy. She wrote fast, as though afraid of missing the one bit of data that would foretell our fortunes. With a blue pen she marked Glenda's wind speed, with a green she did barometric pressure, and with a red she dotted and lined the points along the hurricane's projected path. In the margins she noted that the north and east sides of hurricanes were stronger than the south and west, and that storm surge can rise at a rate of ¼ inch per minute. She marked Pinar del Río, Cuba, where a photographer captured an image of a young boy clutching the upper branches of a tree as floodwaters climbed the trunk, and Puerto Morelos, Mexico, where a wrinkled brown arm was seen reaching through the bars of a window. A line like an open parenthesis cut the center of the map, from the tip of the Yucatan all the way to the lowercase "k" inside the square she had marked as Kay's house. Our house wasn't marked at all.
The Houston street guide sat on the floor beside her, Kay's street in Baytown brightened with a highlighter. Jill cradled her left arm in her lap, an unbroken habit from the months she wore a cast. The cast had been off for almost a month, but her arm wasn't used to being back in the world. She stroked the knob of her wrist bone, rolling the skin beneath her fingertips. Since I had caused the break, seeing her do this reminded me to be nice to her. I sat on the couch behind her, bouncing my knee beside her head. "Hurricanes are the size of Delaware," I said. "If one neighborhood gets it, they all do." I meant this to sound reassuring. A hurricane hadn't threatened Houston in a decade, and that time not a single drop of rain fell on our house. I thought Glenda would fizzle out in the Gulf, or at worst take a last-minute turn and hit either Corpus Christi or Lake Charles. We'd get rain, maybe a little hail, but not much else.

Here's an excerpt from Songs for the Missing, by Stewart O'Nan. It's reviewed today in Guide Sunday and on GuideLive.

The excerpt is provided courtesy of Viking.

Description of the Person, When Last Seen

July, 2005. It was the summer of her Chevette, of J.P. and letting her hair grow. The last summer, the best summer, the summer they'd dreamed of since eighth grade, the high and pride of being seniors lingering, an extension of their best year. She and Nina and Elise, the Three Amigos. In the fall they were gone, off to college, where she hoped, by a long and steady effort, she might become someone else, a private, independent person, someone not from Kingsville at all.
The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?
She did not hate the town, as, years later, her sister would tell one lover. Not Kim, not the good daughter. She loved the lake, how on a clear day you could see all the way to Canada from the bluffs. She loved the river, winding hidden in its mossy gorge of shale down to the harbor. She even loved the slumping Victorian mansions along Grandview her father was always trying to sell, and the sandstone churches downtown, and the stainless steel diner across from the post office. She was just eighteen.

Here's an excerpt from In Hovering Flight, by Joyce Hinnefeld. It's reviewed today in GuideLive and used by permission of Unbridled Books.

Here's an excerpt from Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home, which is reviewed today in GuideLive. It's provided courtesy of Other Press.

Here's an excerpt of Alive in Necropolis, by Doug Dorst. It's reviewed today in the books pages of GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's the prologue to Rose Bowl Dreams by Adam Jones. It's review today in GuideLive.

God created college football as a grand gift to an imperfect world. I learned this as a very small boy living in the middle of the Texas Panhandle. There the horizon line runs unbroken, separating the sky from the vast plains that sit at the top of the Caprock Escarpment, 3500 feet above the Gulf of Mexico. There is nothing but barbed wire to resist the chill of the winter winds sweeping north from the Rocky Mountains. My grandfather often said the reason so many kids from the area served in the Navy was because the Panhandle, which is sheet-metal flat with barely a tree to interrupt the sunsets, has the same horizon line as the open sea.

Into this landscape, the good people of the Panhandle carved out a stadium to accommodate the West Texas State University Buffalo football team. West Texas State, W.T. for short, consecrated the Buffalo Bowl on September 26, 1959, just outside the small college town of Canyon. The bowl was built into one of the only natural valleys in the Panhandle, which obviated the need to build up grandstands since the concrete could be poured straight downhill into the perfect concave mold. The stadium was equipped with electrical outlets under every other seat in the east-side chairback section, enabling any fan with an extension cord to make coffee and toast, listen to the call on the Buffalo radio network, huddle under an electric blanket, and watch television and the game at the same time. Such futuristic thinking made our stadium state of the art long before the luxury suite was invented. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson himself even came to the grand opening. The stadium cozily accommodated 20,000 and on a fall Saturday night, despite the amenities, was usually half full, at best. The Buffalo Bowl's official name was later changed to Kimbrough Memorial Stadium but nobody ever called it that, which was a shame since Frank Kimbrough was a fine football coach and athletic director, with the good sense to pass on at a point when his reputation was fresh and the administration needed someone to name a stadium after.

Here's an excerpt of Stand the Storm by Breena Clarke. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's a peek at what you'll find in Sunday's GuideLive.

A duet of books about our neighbor to the South:
First Stop in the New World, by David Lida
Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines, by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Plus:
Smoke Screen, by Sandra Brown
The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry (look for an online excerpt, as well)
Leather Maiden, by Joe R. Lansdale

Here's an excerpt from The White Mary, by Kira Salak. It's courtesy of Henry Holt & Company. The review appears today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's the opening of The Likeness by Tana French, reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from Telex From Cuba, by Rachel Kushner. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from Oxygen, by former Dallasite Carol Wiley Cassella. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from Beijing Coma by Ma Jian. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

If you're still looking for great beach reads (or just great "curled up in a chair, in front of a fan, clutching a lemonade" reads), consider Anne Cushman's Enlightenment for Idiots and/or Megan Chance's The Spiritualist.

Ms. Cushman's beautifully written, remarkably assured debut novel Enlightenment for Idiots (Shaye Areheart Books, $24) follows Amanda, a young wanna-be yoga teacher who gets sent to India to write a guide book to finding the titular "enlightenment." But at every "peace center" -- ashram, Buddhist temple, yoga/spa -- she visits, things go horribly, hilariously awry, from ripped knee cartilage to verboten guru love. Amanda's biggest hurdle, literally and physically, comes when she discovers she's pregnant and must choose: enlightenment? motherhood? are both possible?

Here's an excerpt from Say You're One of Them, by Uwem Akpan. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from Made in the USA, by Billie Letts. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from The Fruit Hunters, by Adam Leith Gollner.

It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's the opening chapter of A Patent Lie by Paul Goldstein, which is reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from How Perfect Is That, the Austin-based novel by Sarah Bird.

It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from Jonathan Miles' Dear American Airlines, which is reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from "Devil May Care" by Sebastian Faulks. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from "So Brave, Young and Handsome," by Leif Enger. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from The Forgery of Venus, by Michael Gruber. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's part of the first chapter from "Child 44," by Tom Rob Smith. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

And let me offer the personal seal of approval on this one: Call it a literary thriller or a thrilling, literate novel, it works on many levels. Watch for a movie and multiple sequels in years to come, I predict.

The excerpt is provided courtesy of Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group USA.

Our interview with Louise Erdrich appears today in GuideLive. Here's an excerpt from her new novel, The Plague of Doves.

(Update: And don't forget -- you can see her tomorrow when she appears with Arts & Letters Live and The Writers Studio.)

We had an excerpt from Infected (reviewed today in GuideLive) planned for this morning. But as Tom Dodge's review suggests, it had an awful lot of limb-severing and blood-gushing for a blog that is sponsored by a family newspaper.

But have no fear. Scott Sigler has an extensive site of his own that can provide you with sample chapters and more about his work.

Here's an excerpt from "The Girl With No Shadow," by Joanne Harris.

You can read the review in today's GuideLive; you can also see her Tuesday at Arts & Letters Live. (And there's more about her at her publisher's site as well.)

Here's an extensive, exclusive excerpt from "Willie Nelson: An Epic Life," by Joe Nick Patoski, telling how Willie's Classic "Red Headed Stranger" came to be recorded in Garland.

You can read Mario Tarradell's review today in GuideLive as well.

As noted in the print editions of today's excerpt and review of Joe Nick Patoski's book:

Musicians seeking to capture some Willie Nelson magic can do so at what is now Audio Dallas, the Garland recording studio where he recorded his groundbreaking album in January 1975. "We still have a photo in the hallway of Willie sitting back in that room making Red Headed Stranger," said Paul Osborn, who bought the studio in 1996. And Glen Pace, the engineer who built the studio months before Mr. Nelson's recording, "still comes around," according to Mr. Osborn. Audio Dallas is at 3810 Cavalier Drive in West Garland. Call 972-276-3896.

Thanks to staff writer Ray Leszcynski for checking that out, and for providing the following 2004 story about the studio.

Have any Willie stories of your own to share? Don't be a stranger, hit that comments button.

Here's an excerpt from "All the Sad Young Literary Men," reviewed in today's GuideLive. It's reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright (c) 2008 by Keith Gessen.

Here is the opening of "The Story of Forgetting," by Stefan Merrill Block, which is reviewed today in GuideLive.

Mr. Block will appear 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Barnes & Noble, 801 West 15th St., Plano.

You can also see his Web site here.

Here's an excerpt from "The Sum of Our Days" by Isabel Allende. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

The excerpt is provided courtesy of HarperCollins. The illustration is by Guilermo Munro/Special Contributor.

Here's an excerpt from "Lush Life" by Richard Price, which is reviewed today in GuideLive.

The excerpt is Copyright © 2008 by Richard Price. Published in March 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Here is an excerpt from "Tarnished Beauty," reviewed today in GuideLive. The excerpt is Copyright © 2008 by Cecilia Samartin and provided courtesy of Atria/Simon and Schuster.

Click below for an excerpt of "The Sliver Swan," by Benjamin Black, which is the pen name of Man Book Prize-winning author John Banville.

It's provided courtesy of the publisher, Henry Holt and Co., which also sent along this video, wherein the author discusses the differences between his two writing selves.

Here's the opening of "Mudbound" by Hillary Jordan, reviewed today in GuideLive. It's provided courtesy of the publisher, Algonquin Books.

(Fans may be interested in this interview with her from New York, where the former Dallas resident now resides. She'll be back in town 7 p.m. Tuesday to sign books at Barnes & Noble, Preston Road at Royal Lane.

Henry and I dug the hole seven feet deep. Any
shallower and the corpse was liable to come rising up during the next big flood: Howdy boys! Remember me? The thought of it kept us digging even after the blisters on our palms had burst, re-formed and burst again. Every shovelful was an agony -- 
the old man, getting in his last licks. Still, I was glad of the pain. It shoved away thought and memory.

Here's an excerpt (posted a bit early, just in case that software update goes crazy on us) from "Names on a Map," by Benjamin Alire Sáenz , which will be reviewed Sunday in GuideLive.

I came to consciousness listening to my brother's heartbeat. We shared a womb, a mother we very nearly worshipped, a father we came close to hating, a younger brother we adored. For the first eighteen years of our lives, Gustavo and I listened to my father and my mother, observed the nuances of their difficult and beautiful love, told each other secrets, argued about the books we read, listened to the cadences and rhythms of our words and silences.

Here's an excerpt from "Enemy's Cradle," by Sara Young. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

Dagoberto Gilb's novel is reviewed today in GuideLive. Here's a chapter-length excerpt.

Here's a selection from Susan Choi's "A Person of Interest," reviewed today in GuideLive. It's used by permission of Viking.

Here's an excerpt from "Song Yet Sung," by James McBride, which is reviewed in today's GuideLive. The excerpt comes courtesy of Riverhead Books.

Here's an excerpt from "Dogface," by Jeff Garigliano (and reviewed in GuideLive.) Copyright © 2008. Permission granted by MacAdam/Cage Publishing.

Here's an excerpt from "The Bone Rattler," reviewed today in GuideLive. It's provided courtesy of Counterpoint.

After reading today's interview with her, you'll also want to check out our review of "People of the Book."

And below, find an excerpt from the same.

Here's the opening to "Home School," Charles Webb's sequel to "The Graduate," reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here is a short excerpt from "Crawfish Mountain," by Ken Wells, reviewed today in GuideLive.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter 1 of "Someone Knows My Name," by Lawrence Hill, reviewed today in GuideLive.

I SEEM TO HAVE TROUBLE DYING. By all rights, I should not have lived this long. But I still can smell trouble riding on any wind, just as surely as I could tell you whether it is a stew of chicken necks or pigs’ feet bubbling in the iron pot on the fire. And my ears still work just as good as a hound dog’s. People assume that just because you don’t stand as straight as a sapling, you’re deaf. Or that your mind is like pumpkin mush. The other day, when I was being led into a meeting with a bishop, one of the society ladies told another, “We must get this woman into Parliament soon. Who knows how much longer she’ll be with us?” Half bent though I was, I dug my fingers into her ribs. She let out a shriek and spun around to face me. “Careful,” I told her, “I may outlast you!”

Here's an excerpt from "Signed, Mata Hari," by Yannick Murphy.

I CHEATED DEATH. I walked across the sea. When the tide was low I went over the furrowed sandbanks in my small bare feet. I skipped school one day and traveled to an island near my home called Ameland. I had heard stories, every child who lived in the Netherlands knew the stories, about the mud like quicksand and about the water like a great gray wall when the tide came in and how it could catch you and knock you down and pour into your mouth and drown you so that you couldn’t ever return, no matter how hard you tried to climb out of the mud like quicksand and over the great gray wall. But I returned. I went back to the nuns, who had been tolling bells, looking for me. When they found me they showed me their palms, raw from pulling the bell’s rope, and they took me to the headmistress for punishment. Walking to her chambers I whispered proudly into the black folds of their habits. I have walked across the sea. Later my whispers came out as the nuns knelt for Mass, released like cold air once trapped in a cellar, now mixing with their prayers.

Here's an excerpt from "The Florist's Daughter," by Patricia Hampl. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.

For once, no flowers. Past midnight, and very quiet along this corridor. The clock on the opposite wall is round, a cartoon clock. Funny, the idea of keeping time, here of all places. Beneath the clock, a square calendar announces in bold what is now the wrong date, April 3.

I could walk over, just a few steps, tear the page away from the calendar, and make it today, April 4. But that would cause a ripping sound, and I'd have to let go of her hand. So, leave it. In this room it's yesterday. We won't reach today until this is over, the time-warp we entered three days ago. She'd appreciate that, irony being her last grasp on reality.

"This time", the doctor said in the hallway last night -- it might have been two nights ago -- "you understand this time, this is it?"

Five years ago I had faced him wild-eyed in the ER after her first stroke. "What do you want us to do?" he had asked then.

What do I want you to do? I have a graduate degree in lyric poetry, what do I know? But I heard myself say in a commanding voice, "Treat her like a sixteen-year-old who's just crashed on her boyfriend's motorcycle."

Here's an excerpt from "The Pirate's Daughter," by Margaret Cezair-Thompson, reviewed today in GuideLive. It's used by permission of Unbridled Books.

She can see it all from the veranda— the cove and the white bougainvillea that once served her so well. For a moment she sees herself too, a boyish- looking girl running across the lawn to the sea.

The lawn is overgrown now and nameless bushes have sprung up around the bougainvillea. Lizards have taken over the garden and the derelict tennis court. Even here on this upstairs veranda they no longer run away from her.

Here's an excerpt from "Custer's Brother's Horse," by Edwin Shrake. Used by permission of John M. Hardy Publishing.

The fog coming off Shoal Creek was pouring through the prison yard in pearl-colored puffs that made him think of cannon smoke. Captain Jerod Robin lay on his back in the caliche mud with his head leaning against the south wall of the stockade. The Leatherwoods had smashed his pocket watch, but he thought it would be nearing a wet dawn if he could see the sun.

A chain around his ankle locked him to the steps of the gallows platform. Robin's ribs ached from the stomping that had been laid on yesterday evening by Santana Leatherwood and his three nephews. Massaging his sore heart with his fingertips, Robin touched the letter the nurse at the hospital in Tennessee had sewed into the lining of his butternut coat. Several buttons had been torn off the double row down the front of his coat, but the letter was safe. If the Leatherwoods had found and read the letter they would have murdered him yesterday on Pecan Street instead of beating him and throwing him into the bull pen and waiting for the judge to come and hang him to make his death what now passed for legal around here.

Here's the opening to "Eureka" by Jim Lehrer. Copyright © 2007 by Jim Lehrer. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.

A toy fire truck set off the series of events that changed
the life of Otis Halstead, CEO of Kansas Central Fire
and Casualty.

The small cast-iron vehicle was for sale at the Great Prairie
Antiques Show at the Marriott Eureka–East on a Saturday afternoon
in March. Otis’s wife, Sally, had pretty much forced him to
attend the show’s kickoff luncheon because, as one of the leading
businessmen and citizens here in Eureka, Kansas, he should be
seen supporting such a good cause—the battered women’s shelter
run by the Ashland Clinic. Also, their good friend Mary
Gidney was the cochair of the whole thing.

Sally then insisted that Otis go with her on a quick walk
through the show in the hotel’s large exhibition hall. “Why not
at least take a look at what is being offered for sale?” she said.
More than five hundred antiques dealers from more than thirty
states had set up.

“That’s it!” Otis shouted. “I found it!”

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of "The Almost Moon" by Alice Sebold.

"Mother, it's Helen," I said.

"I know who you are!" she barked at me.

Her hands clasped the curved ends of the armrests, and I could see how hard she pressed, her anger flaring up and out at me like involuntary claws.

"That's good," I said.

I stood there a moment longer, until it felt like an established fact. She was my mother and I was her daughter. I thought we could go forward from this into our usual unpleasant encounter.

Here's the introduction to A.J. Jacobs' "The Year of Living Biblically:
One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible." It's
Copyright © 2007 by A. J. Jacobs, used by permission of Simon & Schuster.

As I write this, I have a beard that makes me resemble Moses. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Ted Kaczynski. I've been called all three.

It's not a well-manicured, socially acceptable beard. It's an untamed mass that creeps up toward my eyeballs and drapes below my neckline.

I've never allowed my facial hair to grow before, and it's been an odd and enlightening experience. I've been inducted into a secret fraternity of bearded guys -- we nod at each other as we pass on the street, giving a knowing quarter smile. Strangers have come up to me and petted my beard, like it's a Labrador retriever puppy or a pregnant woman's stomach.

I've suffered for my beard. It's been caught in jacket zippers and been tugged on by my surprisingly strong two-year-old son. I've spent a lot of time answering questions at airport security.

I've been asked if I'm named Smith and sell cough drops with my brother. ZZ Top is mentioned at least three times a week. Passersby have shouted "Yo, Gandalf!" Someone called me Steven Seagal, which I found curious, since he doesn't have a beard.

Here is an excerpt from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, reprinted by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright © 2007 by Junot Diaz.

(Note from the blog editor -- although it rudely disrupts the cadence of his writing, this has been edited to remove language that mainstream media outlets are not quite ready for.)

In October, after all his college applications were in (Fairleigh Dickinson, Montclair, Rutgers, Drew, Glassboro State, William Paterson; he also sent an app to NYU, a one-in-a-million shot, and they rejected him so fast he was amazed the [expletive] hadn’t come back Pony Express) and winter was settling its pale miserable [expletive] across northern New Jersey, Oscar fell in love with a girl in his SAT prep class. The class was being conducted in one of those “Learning Centers” not far from where he lived, less than a mile, so he’d been walking, a healthy way to lose weight, he thought. He hadn’t been expecting to meet anyone, but then he’d seen the beauty in the back row and felt his senses fly out of him. Her name was Ana Obregón, a pretty, loudmouthed gordita who read Henry Miller while she should have been learning to wrestle logic problems. On about their fifth class he noticed her reading Sexus and she noticed him noticing, and, leaning over, she showed him a passage [...]
.
You must think I’m weird, right? she said during the break.

You ain’t weird, he said. Believe me—I’m the top expert in the state.

Here's an excerpt from "The Bright Side of Disaster" by Houston's Katherine Center. (Copyright 2007 Random House; used by permission of the author.) Technical issues resolved, you can now read the review here.

My friend Nadia had been a project manager in a power job at Shell Oil. She had a silk-and-leather wardrobe and rectangular glasses that made her look both smarter and cooler than anybody in the room. She was exfoliated, she was plucked, she had glossy black hair, and men were always hitting on her. Hitting on Nadia was a no-brainer.
And I was almost her opposite. I didn’t own a hair dryer, mostly wore jeans, and had an affection for sneakers that Nadia didn’t understand. In my good moments, I rated myself as “pretty cute,” but I was no match for her. I got hit on myself, sometimes. But never, ever when I was with her. And Dean was no exception.
He spied us one night at a swanky after-hours restaurant, and when Nadia got up to go check out the bathroom, he sat himself down across from me in her chair.

Here's an excerpt from "Loving Frank," by Nancy Horan. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

You can learn more about the book at its Web site.

1907

CHAPTER 1

Mamah Cheney sidled up to the Studebaker and put her hand sideways on the crank. She had started the thing a hundred times before, but she still heard Edwin’s words whenever she grabbed on to the handle. Leave your thumb out. If you don’t, the crank can fly back and take your thumb right off. She churned with a fury now, but no sputter came from beneath the car’s hood. Crunching across old snow to the driver’s side, she checked the throttle and ignition, then returned to the handle and cranked again. Still nothing. A few teasing snowflakes floated under her hat rim and onto her face. She studied the sky, then set out from her house on foot toward the library.

It was a bitterly cold end-of-March day, and Chicago Avenue was a river of frozen slush. Mamah navigated her way through steaming horse droppings, the hem of her black coat lifted high. Three blocks west, at Oak Park Avenue, she leaped onto the wooden sidewalk and hurried south as the wet snow grew dense.

By the time she reached the library, her toes were frozen stumps, and her coat was nearly white. She raced up the steps, then stopped at the door of the lecture hall to catch her breath. Inside, a crowd of women listened intently as the president of the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club read her introduction.

"Is there a woman among us who is not confronted—almost daily—by some choice regarding how to ornament her home?" The president looked over her spectacles at the audience. "Or, dare I say, herself?" Still panting, Mamah slipped into a seat in the last row and flung off her coat. All around her, the faint smell of camphor fumes wafted from wet furs slung across chair backs. "Our guest speaker today needs no introduction . . ."

Here's the second installment of excerpts from "William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony," by William and Rosalie Schiff and Craig Hanley, which was published by the University of North Texas Press.

As I said last week -- it's an amazing tale, a vital tale, told well here.

(Photo: William and Rosalie Schiff after the war with their son Michael.)

Here's an excerpt from "Red Rover," by Deirdre McNamer.

1927
North of Neva, Montana

They were gauchos of the Argentine, horsemen to their bones. Wanderers, survivors, riders, and lovers, their life the life of cattle and horses and stars. Broad grasslands, hum of the stars, meat on a spit. The boleadoras, a hiss through the air. Long rawhide, three stones, the horseman’s long snare. Child of God, child of the pampas, child of himself. Lover of the long ride.
Straight and steady lover of the long ride. Hard luck and death itself? The gaucho shrugs. ¡Qué lástima! Fear cannot touch him. Governments fester and connive and cannot touch him, this child of himself. Judges, merchants, officers, priests, the ruthless leather merchants, they cannot touch him. Lover of the long ride. His soul before him like the bell mare.

Old Corral and Approaching Storm, Late Afternoon,
Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, New Mexico, 2005

Photographer Craig Varjabedian. will be signing "Four & Twenty Photographs: Stories from Behind the Lens" Friday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Afterimage Photograph Gallery, The Quadrangle #141, 2800 Routh Street.

Here's the opening of Sandra Brown's "Play Dirty," which is reviewed today. It's used by permission of Simon & Schuster.

"That it?"

"That's it." Griff Burkett tossed a small duffel bag onto the backseat of the car, then got into the front passenger seat. "I didn't bring much with me. I'm sure as hell not taking souvenirs." He wanted no memorabilia from his stint in BIG -- official code name for the Federal Correctional Institute in Big Spring, Texas.

He made himself comfortable on the plush leather, adjusted the air-conditioning vent to blow straight at him, then, realizing they weren't moving, looked over at the driver.

"Seat belt."

"Oh. Right." Griff stretched the belt across his chest and latched it. Tongue in cheek, he said, "Wouldn't want to break the law."

Here's an excerpt from "Jesus Out to Sea," by James Lee Burke, which is reviewed in today's books section. (Used by permission of Simon & Schuster.)

The coffee cup was cold in the professor's hand. He looked down at the creek that flowed out of the dark stands of pine and fir in the national forest. In the center the riffle was a deep blue-green between sheets of ice that looked like teeth. Through the willow frame of the sweat lodge he could see two smooth, round boulders that always reminded him of a woman's breasts, and behind them a barkless and polished cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream to form an eddying pool whose pebbled bottom was always marbled with the shapes of cutthroat and brookie trout. In the spring and summer he and the students would fish the pool, have community dinners among the ferns on the bank, and pack far into the canyon, where the cinnamon bears and white-tailed deer were never hunted and bighorn sheep grazed through the saddles high up on the peaks.

Here's a short excerpt from "Uprooted" by Nanette Guadiano-Campos, one of the stories in Fifteen Candles, which is reviewed today.

Tía Chelo made her grand entrance in a leopard- print spandex jumpsuit so tight, you could see every nook and cranny made by every tortilla she ’d ever eaten in her seventy- one years on this planet. On the day of my quinceañera, she walked into the church right behind me in black patent- leather stilettos and fire red lipstick, smelling of Jean Naté and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, oblivious to the “Ay, Dios mío’s” of the congregation and the mortified expression on Father Smith’s Irish- Catholic face.

I knew something was wrong when I saw everyone staring at something behind me, rather than right at me. Tía Chelo’s strong smells were almost enough to make me turn around, but the expression on my mother’s face and her year- long obsession with
this precise moment kept the smile glued to my lips and my eyes on the mark: Jesus staring down in pity from a life- size cross. “Keep walking,” my cousin (and escort) Juan whispered through a frozen smile. He had sensed my hesitation, felt the nails
on my right hand squeeze his left arm. In my peripheral vision, I saw my father walk beside me, then behind, and then reappear with my tía on his arm. He led her to a pew where she actually waved at the crowd and popped her gum before winking at me in
approval.

Excerpt from Peony in Love by Lisa See. Used by permission of Random House.

Two days before my sixteenth birthday, i woke up so early that my maid was still asleep on the floor at the foot of my bed. I should have scolded Willow, but I didn’t because I wanted a few moments alone to savor my excitement and anticipation. Beginning tonight, I would attend a production of The Peony Pavilion mounted in our garden. I loved this opera and had collected eleven of the thirteen printed versions available. I liked to lie in bed and read of the maiden Liniang and her dream lover, their adventures, and their ultimate triumph. But for three nights, culminating on Double Seven— the seventh day of the seventh month, the day of the lovers’ festival, and my birthday—I would actually see the opera, which was normally forbidden to girls and women. My father had invited other families for the festivities. We’d have contests and banquets. It was going to be amazing.

Excerpt from Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West by Michael Punke. Used by permission of HarperCollins.

J. Wright Mooar, a young man from Vermont, traveled south and west with a fellow hunter until, in the Panhandle of Texas, they found their buffalo, “millions upon millions.” “For five days,” remembered Mooar, “we had ridden through and camped in a mobile sea of living buffalo.”