Fluffing The Concrete: Making The Most Of Foreign Prison-or Anything Else

Humor & Entertainment

Dryden, Mack

Humor

Texas Review Press

A Bible's family tree and an embroidered handkerchief hold the key to understanding the past as six generation Texan, Gracey Reiter prepares to say goodbye to her dying father, the last surviving member of the Walsh-Mueller family. The present holds the answer, and the last opportunity for Gracey to understand her father's anger, her mother's guilt, and her siblings' version of the truth. The Walsh-Mueller family begins in Texas when Patricia Walsh leaves the famine of nineteenth century Ireland, losing her parents and siblings along the way. She finds a home, love, and security with Emil Mueller in a German settlement near Indianola on the Texas Gulf Coast. They begin their lives on a small cotton farm, raising six sons. From the coastal plains of Texas, five generations survive hurricanes, wars, The Great Depression, and life, itself. An all-encompassing novel that penetrates the core being of all who read it, A Good Girl pulls back the skin to reveal the raw actualities of life, love, and relationships. It is the ageless story of family.

A Good Girl: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Bernhard, Johnnie

United States

Theodora Ziolkowski’s novella tells the story of twenty-eight-year-old Eva, in grief from the death of her childhood best friend and lover Sebastian. After Eva agrees to be her eccentric mother’s maid of honor, she finds herself swept up in events leading to her mother’s second marriage—including a mother-daughter adventure at a New Jersey spa. Startling revelations spur Eva to come to terms with not only her grief but a secret that threatens, once discovered, to overwhelm her. “My mother, Leonora Marino, was betrothed to the owner of a used car dealership called ‘The Lemon Tree.’ One unfortunate detail about her fiancé’s claim to fame being that its office and lots were painted bladder-stimulant yellow. This meant it was only natural that upon crossing into The Lemon Tree’s domain, you became senseless, pervaded by a wild urge to pee. I often noticed potential customers swaying as they waited to be assisted, bouncing on their heels; their general conduct derived not from impatience, but rather from an effort to disguise their discomfort. But perhaps my mother’s soon-to-be-hubby designed the space precisely so the hooey of swapping countless tons of metal for the big bucks was done swiftly.”

On the Rocks: A Novella

Bishop Ziolkowski, Theodora

Humor & Satire

These poems travel physically and emotionally, addressing the human condition through evocative language. “Enter Water, Swimmer” and you will be steeped in various manifestations of this world and beyond, daring to take on diverse realms of women, belief, culture, and ethics. Day One You slipped through me, not by me. How could I have known I would fall through these waters into the country of us?

Enter Water Swimmer: Poems

Self-Help

Morris, Mary

Relationships

Fifty-year-old Karen Anders, a high school English teacher and the adoptive mother of Tiffany, comes to terms with being a single-parent and a clumsy drunk in the multicultural melting pot of Houston, Texas, as she forges an unlikely friendship with Leona Supak, a WWII Hungarian refugee, who inspires Karen to change her views on motherhood, drinking, and men. Karen’s teaching job provides an ongoing challenge with low scoring students and a lack of support from school administrators. Meanwhile, Tiffany moves to Austin to attend the University of Texas, but soon neglects her academic life when she meets a gamer boyfriend and begins a job at the Ink &amp; Juice, a tattoo parlor-juicing bar. Tiffany hides the truth of her new life from Karen through a text-only relationship. Feeling rejected, Karen explores the paradox of romance for the middle-aged. Despite the challenges, a family unit comes together inspired by strangers and second chances in How We Came to Be.

How We Came to Be: A Novel

Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials

Along Texas roadways rest thousands of contemplative shrines, usually marked by small, white metal crosses. Anchored by the stunning photography of roadside memorials by Dan Streck, this landmark book allows four poets to respond to the visual summons of roadside memorials with lyric intensity and eloquent ekphrasis: Larry D. Thomas, Jack B. Bedell, Sarah Cortez, and Loueva Smith. Graphic designer Nancy J. Parsons brings her award-winning skills to perfectly meld photography with poetry in this gorgeous volume.  A Plain, White Cross   It lists slightly beside the highway. Whoever placed it there drove its upright  deep into the earth,  intimate with the tragedy of wind and driving rain. Knowing the certainty  of erasure, they left it nameless, just a simple wooden cross harboring,  for a while, the traces  of unbearable loss. As if lit from within with white light, it glows beside the silent highway:  white light stark as the grief of the bereaved,  white as the clouds above,  streaking, disintegrating.  Larry D. Thomas

Arts & Photography

Cortez, Sarah

Photography & Video

During the summer of 1880, amid the searing heat of the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas and northern Mexico, Chief Victorio led his band of Mescalero and Warm Springs Apaches in a last, desperate exodus from a disease-ridden, barren reservation. Raiding cattle and horses to survive, Victorio and his people eluded pursuers on both sides of the Rio Grande, as the US Army, the Texas Rangers, and the Mexican territorial militia combined forces to ferret out and eliminate the fugitive Apaches. Into the midst of the authentic historical backdrop of what became known as the Victorio War, author Don DeNevi places Shep, a black German Shepherd rescued and loved by Joseph Andrews and William Wiswall, two adventurers from the Colorado mining country. Shep forms an inexplicable bond with the Apache chief that leads Wiswall and Andrews into an unexpected and uncomfortable role. The imagined events of Shep in the Victorio War follow immediately upon those portrayed in DeNevi’s earlier novel, Faithful Shep: The Story of a Hero Dog and the Nine Texas Rangers Who Saved Him. DeNevi’s blend of meticulous historical research and rip-roaring adventure make this story of “the last Indian fight in Texas” a must-read for fans of Old West fiction, the Texas Rangers, the cavalry, and frontier history.

Shep in the Victorio War

DeNevi, Don

Blindsided follows Eli as she leads Carla, a local real estate agent, through an election for Key West city mayor. At first, the campaign process appears easy. Despite their differences, the two women work well together. But as time progresses, they face countless obstacles: the Bubba system in the Keys, discrimination from both supporting and opposing forces, and their rapidly intensifying relationship. While Carla starts to doubt her decisions, Eli struggles to find her place in the Keys and in Carla’s budding campaign.

Blindsided: A Novella

Catherine, Ms. Chelsea

Literary

This short story collection offers snapshots of a life. A kid is set up by an old uncle to think he’s going to be scalped. Seeing demons in every shadow a few nights later, he’s told by an older cousin it was all a joke, that adults always seem to want kids to go through the same bad things they did. Just how they are. Shut up, he’s advised. Get used to it. Hunkered in the dark listening. In the next room, bubbling a bottle with a drinking buddy, his Old Man telling tales of roadhouse glory. Bad odds fist fights, rearranged faces that stay that way. For weeks he wakes afraid to touch his face. Will his nose, ears and eyes have shifted places while he slept, his face forever scrambled, rearranged? Riots and war. Conscription. The fights, the violence no longer just yarns heard late at night. Drafted at eighteen, he has to decide, will he go halfway round the world to kill people he has no earthly quarrel with? Considers conscientious objection. His girlfriend bluntly asks him when he became a pacifist. You can’t, she suggests, the minute you get drafted, suddenly announce yourself as some kind of Instant Gandhi. Not, anyway, and expect a Draft Board made up of World War II vets to buy it. Teaching in a tiny mountain town. Some kids, he’s told early on, are just too dumb to bother with. Signing on for a salesman’s pay. Hit your quota or hit the road. Logic of a kiss, that sprung free promise of what life can be, the one constant throughout. A better way glimpsed, lost and found, here and gone. Pitchman’s blues.

Pitchman's Blues: Stories

Kelly, Jim

In Flying South on the Back of a Dove, Kelly Rowe writes of loss: loss of life, of innocence, of love. She explores how our losses weigh on us, and how we shoulder and carry them through our lives. These poems are also about return: to a South that is the landscape of childhood, an Eden that exists only in memory and in dreams. Describing an arc from childhood to middle age, the poems confront the brutality of everyday existence, from suicide to domestic violence to murder, but also celebrate how we reach for hope, so elusive and so necessary. The Traveling Salesman’s Wife On Mondays you drive off to your other life; I lie in bed and wonder if you have another wife, in Pearson, or Baxley, or Florida somewhere, waiting up as I do, Wednesday and Friday nights . . .

Flying South on the Back of a Dove: Poems

Rowe, Kelly

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