Texas Bound

Nineteen stories from the literary series Arts and Letters Live, in which Texas actors read stories by Texas writers to theater audiences. The stories range from a Houston heiress being crowned an Italian princess along with a palace, to a young black's struggle with racism.

Seth had never cared for the easy life. When things got too comfortable he always found trouble--or it found him. He had found at an early age the prosperous plantation that had been in his family for four generations did not offer enough challenges to make him happy. In fact, the whole state of Virginia was too tame for him. So, as soon as he graduated from William and Mary, he struck out to find someplace he could have the freedom and space he desired. In 1836, after nearly a year of searching, he finds himself in Texas. He enters the territory just days after the small, inexperienced Texas army, in it's attempt to win Texas' independence from Mexico, has met a devastating defeat at the hands of the large and powerful Mexican army. After establishing a rather large and prosperous cattle ranch in the Texas hill country he meets the woman who makes his life complete. They raise a family and together meet the challenges of the unsettled frontier. Together they establish a Texas dynasty and leave their footprints in Texas history.

Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations—particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles—complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history also uses music and sound to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston's blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics. This interdisciplinary book provides both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century and a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy.

Twenty-two stories featured in the "Texas Bound" segment of the literary series "Arts and Letters Live" presented by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Friends of the Dallas Public Library. Book III offers encounters with a lovelorn parrot, a small-town Texan "under the weather" on a housebound sick day, a Houston matron whose "back-to-nature" weekend in the country changes her life, and a professor whose medical diagnosis turns into a profound yet somehow hilarious adventure.

Jake and John's experimental tractor fuel brings Texan tractors to life. American Chillers series.

The heart-pounding sequel to Cast in Firelight, perfect for fans of epic, sweepingly romantic fantasy by Sabaa Tahir, Susan Dennard, and Mary E. Pearson. After a magical eruption devastates the kingdom of Belwar, royal heir Adraa is falsely accused of masterminding the destruction and forced to stand trial in front of her people, who see her as a monster. Adraa's punishment? Imprisonment in the Dome, an impenetrable, magic-infused fortress filled with Belwar’s nastiest criminals—many of whom Adraa put there herself. And they want her to pay. Jatin, the royal heir to Naupure, has been Adraa’s betrothed, nemesis, and fellow masked vigilante . . . but now he’s just a boy waiting to ask her the biggest question of their lives. First, though, he’s going to have to do the impossible: break Adraa out of the Dome. And he won’t be able to do it without help from the unlikeliest of sources—a girl from his past with a secret that could put them all at risk. Time is running out, and the horrors Adraa faces in the Dome are second only to the plot to destabilize and destroy their kingdoms. But Adraa and Jatin have saved the world once already. . . . Now, can they save themselves? "I was hooked from beginning to end!"—Kathryn Purdie, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Bone Crier’s Moon "Fans of Serpent & Dove’s smart-alecky Lou and The Wrath and the Dawn’s cunning Shazi should prepare themselves to fall head over heels for the fiery Adraa."—Kelly Coon, author of the Gravemaidens duology

Before the invention of the combine, the binder was an essential harvesting implement that cut grain and bound the stalks in bundles tied with twine that could then be hand-gathered into shocks for threshing. Hundreds of thousands of farmers across the United States and Canada relied on binders and the twine required for the machine’s operation. Implement manufacturers discovered that the best binder twine was made from henequen and sisal—spiny, fibrous plants native to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. The double dependency that subsequently developed between Mexico and the Great Plains of the United States and Canada affected the agriculture, ecology, and economy of all three nations in ways that have historically been little understood. These interlocking dependencies—identified by author Sterling Evans as the “henequen-wheat complex”—initiated or furthered major ecological, social, and political changes in each of these agricultural regions. Drawing on extensive archival work as well as the existing secondary literature, Evans has woven an intricate story that will change our understanding of the complex, transnational history of the North American continent.

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.