Books in the Southwestern Writers Collection Series, Wittliff Collections at Texas State University series

Amplified with reading lists and quotations from a wide diversity of writers, best-selling mystery author Susan Wittig Albert's thoughtful and thought-provoking journal of the tumultuous year 2008 is a must-read for everyone fascinated by the writing life and the writer's role in society.

This collection shares decades of correspondence between the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and one of his closest friendsincluding personal photos.One of America's leading dramatists, as well as an accomplished actor, screenwriter, and director, Sam Shepard's legacy includes immortal plays like True West andBuried Child, as well as memorable film roles, including his Academy Award-nominated performance in The Right Stuff. Though Shepard remained an intensely private man, he wrote candidly about his life and work in letters to his close friend Johnny Dark. His former father-in-law, Dark became a surrogate brother to Shepard, and even an artistic muse. Two Prospectorsgathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between them.In these letters, the men open themselves to each other with gripping honesty. Shepard's letters give us the deepest look we will ever get into his personal philosophy and creative process, while in Dark's letters we discover insights into Shepard's character that only an intimate friend could provide. The writers also reflect on the books and authors that stimulate their thinking, their relationships with women (including Shepard's anguished decision to leave his wife and son for actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years. Illustrated with Dark's photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters,Two Prospectorsis a compelling portrait of a complex friendship that anchored both lives for decades, a friendship also poignantly captured in Treva Wurmfeld's film,Shepard & Dark.

';Sepich offers his insight and detailed research to the less knowledgeable reader. He crafts a book that will delight the McCarthy specialists.' Western American Literature Blood Meridian (1985), Cormac McCarthy's epic tale of an otherwise nameless ';kid' who in his teens joins a gang of licensed scalp hunters whose marauding adventures take place across Texas, Chihuahua, Sonora, Arizona, and California during 1849 and 1850, is widely considered to be one of the finest novels of the Old West, as well as McCarthy's greatest work. The New York Times Book Review ranked it third in a 2006 survey of the ';best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years,' and in 2005 Time chose it as one of the 100 best novels published since 1923. Yet Blood Meridian's complexity, as well as its sheer bloodiness, makes it difficult for some readers. To guide all its readers and help them appreciate the novel's wealth of historically verifiable characters, places, and events, John Sepich compiled what has become the classic reference work, Notes on Blood Meridian. Originally published in 1993, Notes remained in print for only a few years and has become highly sought-after in the rare book market, with used copies selling for hundreds of dollars. In bringing the book back into print to make it more widely available, Sepich has revised and expanded Notes with a new preface and two new essays that explore key themes and issues in the work. This amplified edition of Notes on Blood Meridian is the essential guide for all who seek a fuller understanding and appreciation of McCarthy's finest work.

';Josyph takes an aggressively unconventional approach to McCarthy's work, combining elements of travelogue, interview and memoir.' The Washington Post In Cormac McCarthy's House, author, painter, photographer, and actor-director Peter Josyph draws on a wide range of experience to pose provocative, unexpected questions about McCarthy's work. As a visual artist, Josyph wrestles with the challenge of rendering McCarthy's former home in El Paso as a symbol of a great writer's workshop. As an actor and filmmaker, he analyzes the high art of Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited and No Country for Old Men. Invoking the recent suicide of a troubled friend, he grapples with the issue of ';our brother's keeper' in The Crossing and The Sunset Limited. But for Josyph, reading the finest prose-poet of our day is a project into which he invites many voices, and his investigations include a talk with Mark Morrow about photographing McCarthy while he was writing Blood Meridian; an in-depth conversation with director Tom Cornford on the challenges of staging The Sunset Limited and The Stonemason; a walk through the streets, waterfronts, and hidden haunts of Suttree with McCarthy scholar and Knoxville resident Wesley Morgan; insights from the cast of The Gardener's Son about a controversial scene in that film; actress Miriam Colon's perspective on portraying the Duea Alfonsa opposite Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses; and a harsh critique of Josyph's views on The Crossing by McCarthy scholar Marty Priola, which leads to a sometimes heated debate. Illustrated with thirty-one photographs, Josyph's unconventional journeys into the genius of Cormac McCarthy form a new, highly personal way of appreciating literary greatness.

From mind-melting psychedelia and surreal treatments of Texas iconography to inventive interpretations of rock and roll, western swing, and punk, this book offers the definitive, long-overdue survey of music poster art by legendary Texas artists.

This book collects seventeen of Cartwright's best Texas Monthly articles from the 1980s and 1990s, along with a new essay, "My Most Unforgettable Year," about the lasting legacy of the Kennedy assassination.

A collection of seven compelling plays from award-winning Texas writers, spanning turning points in history, intergenerational struggles, and cultural triumphs while exploring the complexity of African American life from a dazzling array of perspectives.

Writing with both a wry sense of humor and an insider's compassion, Prudence Mackintosh offers us a fascinating look into the world of privileged, educated, well-married, well-connected, and mostly wealthy white Texas women.

In this beautifully written memoir, the author of the popular China Bayles mystery series meditates on what it means to be married-to a person and a place-while also needing to be alone and experience silence and solitude.

An engaging collection of crime fiction in which Texas is as much a character as a setting.

This book brings together 139 of Ace Reid's popular "Cowpokes" cartoons, reproduced in large format to show the artistry and attention to detail that characterized Reid's work.

The rich, complex lives of African Americans in Texas were often neglected by the mainstream media, which historically seldom ventured into Houston's Fourth Ward, San Antonio's East Side, South Dallas, or the black neighbourhoods in smaller cities. This title presents the author's writing about the soul of black Texas.

In this collection of essays, Prudence Mackintosh follows her sons through the "tween" years between little boyhood and adolescence.

In this collection of new and previously published essays, Prudence Mackintosh recounts life with her adolescent sons as they race headlong to first jobs, first driver's licenses, first girlfriends, and first flights away from the family nest.

An anthology of works by a beloved Texas writer.

A collection of writings by emerging and well-known writers, including Joy Harjo, Denise Chavez, Diane Ackerman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldua, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barbara Kingsolver, that explores women's experiences in t

With telling vignettes of boyish disasters that drive her to despair, as well as the rare quiet moments of hugs and confidences that make it all worthwhile, Prudence Mackintosh perfectly captures the early years of parenthood, when a young mother still lo