Meetings start at 6:30 p.m. on the 3rd Thursday of each month at the Fielder Museum, 1616 W. Abram St. Arlington Texas, 76016
Club coordinators: O.K. Carter and Mark Dellenbaugh 

In an exciting collaboration between the library and the Arlington Historical Society, the new Texas Author Book Club will alternate between the best of nonfiction and fiction writers, from J. Frank Dobie and Larry McMurtry to John Graves and Cormac McCarthy, and will include some classic material as well as exploring more contemporary books - some old authors and some new ones.

To borrow from Larry McMurtry's In a Narrow Grave, the books under review by the club "...are native in the most obvious sense: set here, centered here, and, for the most part, written here."  

Many of the books are available through the Arlington Library but in very limited supply. All of them are, however, available at a reasonable price (particularly used editions) from online entities such as Amazon or Thrift Books. Many can also be purchased as eBooks. 

SCHEDULE:

September 19, 2024 — Kinky Friedman - Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola

Kinky Friedman is a Jewish Texan country-and-western singer turned Greenwich Village amateur detective, with a collection of smelly cigars, a cat, and two former — but simultaneous — girlfriends named Judy. Shortly after the possibly suspicious death of one of his closest friends, Kinky finds himself short one Judy, as Uptown Judy vanishes under mysterious circumstances. Before long, the death and the disappearance seem to be connected, along with Elvis impersonators, a missing documentary film, and a five-year-old mob murder. It’ll take the Kinkster, with an assist from the Village Irregulars and Downtown Judy, to wrap this case like a New York Tex-Mex, decidedly nonkosher burrito.
 

October 17, 2024 — Katherine Anne Porter - Pale Horse, Pale Rider

The classic 1939 collection of 3 novellas by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author and journalist, including the famous title story our discussion will focus on.

A character from an earlier novella, Miranda, returns in the title story, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” She is now working as a drama critic for a newspaper in Denver, where she falls in love with a soldier, Adam, during the influenza epidemic of 1918. When Miranda falls ill, Adam cares for her until she is moved to a hospital. Throughout her ordeal, on everyone’s mind is the war, the war, the WAR to end WAR, war for Democracy, for humanity, a safe world forever and ever.
 

November 21, 2024 — Lawrence Wright - God Save Texas

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

The inspiration for the HBO Original documentary trilogy God Save Texas streaming on Max.

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.
 

DECEMBER 2024 — No Meeting!!!
 

January 16, 2025 — Stephen Harrigan - The Gates of the Alamo

The Gates of the Alamo. A huge, riveting, deeply imagined novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo, an event that formed the consciousness of Texas and that resonates through American history. With its vibrant, unexpected characters and its richness of authentic detail, The Gates of the Alamo is an unforgettable re-creation of a time, a place, and a heroic conflict.

Never before has the fall of the Alamo been portrayed with such immediacy. And for the first time the story is told not just from the perspective of the American defenders but from that of the Mexican attackers as well. We follow Blas Montoya, a sergeant in an elite sharpshooter company, as he fights to keep his men alive not only in the inferno of battle but also during the long forced march north from Mexico proper to Texas. And through the eyes of the ambitious mapmaker Telesforo Villasenor, we witness the cold deliberations of General Santa Anna.

Filled with dramatic scenes, abounding in fictional and historical personalities — among them James Bowie, David Crockett, and William Travis — The Gates of the Alamo enfolds us in history, and through its remarkable and passionate storytelling allows us to participate at last in an American legend.
 

February 20, 2025 — Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford - Forget the Alamo

Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head.

Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos — Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels — scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness.

In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.
 

March 20, 2025 — Fernando A. Flores - Tears of the Truffle Pig

A parallel universe. South Texas. A third border wall might be erected between the United States and Mexico, narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: filtered animals — species of animals brought back from extinction to amuse the very wealthy.

Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life gets complicated after a swashbuckling journalist invites him to an underground dinner at which filtered animals are served. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous and surreal journey, in the course of which he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Truffle pig, said to possess strange powers. Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores’s Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, and an introduction to a staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction.
 

April 17, 2025 — Joe Landsdale - Sugar on the Bones

In this holy mess of a case for the perpetual bad boy (New York Times) sleuths in the beloved Hap and Leonard series, PI Duo Hap and Leonard investigate the untimely death of a woman whose family stood much to gain from her passing.

Minnie Polson is dead. Burned to a crisp in a fire so big and bad it had to be deliberate. The only thing worse is that Hap and Leonard could have prevented it. Maybe. Minnie had a feeling she was being targeted, shaken down by some shadowy force. However, when she’d solicited Hap & Leonard, all it took was one off-color joke to turn her sour and she’d called them off the investigation. Wracked with a guilty conscience, the two PIs — along with Hap’s fleet-footed wife, Brett — tuck into the case. As they look closer, they dredge up troublesome facts: for one, Minnie’s daughter, Alice, has recently vanished. She’d been hard up after her pet grooming business went under and was in line to collect a whopping insurance sum should anything happen to her mother. The same was due to Minnie’s estranged husband, Al, whose kryptonite (beautiful, money-grubbing women) had left him with only a run-down mobile home. But did Minnie’s foolish, cash-strapped family really have it in them to commit a crime this grisly? Or is there a larger, far more sinister scheme at work?
 

May 15, 2025 — Nan Cuba - Body and Bread

In Body and Bread, Nan Cuba goes straight to the heart of love and death and families and religion and the land. — Grace Dane Mazur, author of Silk: Stories and Trespass: a Novel

Years after her brother Sam's suicide, Sarah Pelton remains unable to fully occupy her world without him in it. Now, while her surviving brothers prepare to sell the family's tenant farm and a young woman's life hangs in the balance, Sarah is forced to confront the life Sam lived and the secrets he left behind. As she assembles the artifacts of her family's history in east Texas in the hope of discovering her own future, images from her work as an anthropologist — images of sacrifice, ritual, and death — haunt her waking dreams. In this moving debut novel, Nan Cuba unearths the power of family legacies and the indelible imprint of loss on all our lives.

Winner of the PEN/Southwest Book Award in Fiction.
Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award.