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Texas Bound I 19 Texas Stories Edited by Kay Cattarulla Foreword by Lawrence Wright
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"Texas Bound is a stirring chorus of voices, no two alike. Everyone sings out loud and clear—country songs, city songs, quiet, noisy, angry, lyrical, and, not least, irreverent. Which is what you'd expect of Texas, where southern meets western and a great storytelling tradition continues to flourish."—Rosellen Brown
This lavish spread of literary entertainment features nineteen stories selected from the first two seasons of "Texas Bound," part of the "Arts and Letters Live" literary series presented at the Dallas Museum of Art by the Museum and the Friends of the Dallas Public Library.
From pickup trucks and prairie skies to rhinestone cowboys and glittering skylines, these stories explore the Lone Star State—both its terrain and its state of mind. The volume includes stories by well-known Texas authors such as Larry McMurtry, Rick Bass, and Larry L. King, as well as stories by Texans with less familiar names.
In "There Will Be Peace in Korea" Larry McMurtry catches the gritty realities of life in a West Texas town on the night before a young man goes off to war.
William Goyen's "The Texas Principessa" is a hilarious tale about a Houston dry goods heiress who goes to Venice to marry an impoverished Italian prince.
Reginald McKnight's "The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas" depicts a young black boy in a Waco school who comes face-to-face with his own version of racism.
"Old Enough" by Mary K. Flatten is about love and loss in Austin, narrated by a woman on whom the emotional tables have been turned.
The anthology also features stories by Lee Merrill Byrd, Diane DeSanders, Robert Flynn, A.C. Greene, William Hauptman, Shelby Hearon, Tomas Rivera, Annette Sanford, C.W. Smith, Lynna Williams, Bryan Woolley, and Lawrence Wright.
Whether the setting is a country cemetery near Chillicothe, a ‘50s-style burger joint in Dallas's Deep Ellum, or a Baptist youth camp in Oklahoma, the stories depict people who are "Texas Bound"—bound to the state, bound for it, or bound together by it.
"Texas Bound constitutes a heartening body of evidence that writing in or from or about our region has been not only keeping up nobly with the times, but also holding onto a sense of where it comes from."—John Graves
KAY CATTARULLA holds degrees from Cornell and Columbia universities. After an early career in book publishing in New York, she lived for ten years in Europe, South America, and the Middle East, accompanying her husband, Elliot, an executive with Exxon Corporation. On their return to New York in the seventies, she allied herself with a group of performing artists in a pioneering community theater on the Upper West Side. She worked for twelve years for that organization, Symphony Space, and in 1985 originated the nationally known literary series "Selected Shorts," in which actors read short fiction to a live audience. In 1990 the Cattarullas moved to Dallas, and in 1992 Kay founded the "Arts and Letters Live" literary series. The Cattarullas have one son, John.
A staff writer for the New Yorker, LAWRENCE WRIGHT is the author of four non-fiction books: City Children, Country Summer; In the New World: Growing Up with America, 1960–1984; Saints and Sinners; and Remembering Satan. He was born in Dallas and lives in Austin.
Southwest Life and Letters
Texas Bound I
ISBN 0-87074-368-6 paper $12.95
LC 93-45385. 6x9. 262 pp.
Fiction.
Publication Date: February 1994.
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