Texas Is Bursting With Independent Books
Our state’s legacy of great writing has a publishing tradition to match. Here are a handful of the dozens of outfits producing great books in Texas.
Jeff Salamon is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and previously served as an editor at the Village Voice and the Austin American-Statesman. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, Details, and Artforum. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a native of New York City. He lives in Austin with his wife, two children, two dogs, and one cat.
Our state’s legacy of great writing has a publishing tradition to match. Here are a handful of the dozens of outfits producing great books in Texas.
By Jeff Salamon
‘The Madstone,’ a sequel to 2018’s ‘The Which Way Tree,’ is a compelling read on its own terms.
By Jeff Salamon
. . . When it comes to producing renewable energy, winning golf tournaments, banning books, and closing rural hospitals. Why is Texas so darn great . . . and so darn awful?
Texas Monthly staffer Dan Solomon discusses his first book, ‘The Fight for Midnight,’ which comes out as we approach the ten-year anniversary of a dramatic day (and night) at the Legislature.
By Jeff Salamon
Why has San Antonio fallen behind Houston, Dallas, and Austin?
By Jeff Salamon
You can’t blame Jeb.
By Jeff Salamon
Why the grocery chain’s rise has proven unstoppable.
By Jeff Salamon
From George Jones to Attica Locke, these Texans have made lasting cultural impacts on the state.
By Jeff Salamon and Texas Monthly
In Gabino Iglesias’s horror novel, racism, a broken health-care system, and Mexican cartels meet up with powerful brujas and disemboweled zombies.
By Jeff Salamon
Bill Broyles—now best known as a Hollywood screenwriter—remembers the magazine’s first issue.
By Jeff Salamon
A conversation with the author of the moving and assured ‘God Spare the Girls.’
By Jeff Salamon
The New York–born singer-songwriter got to Texas as soon as he could—and spent the next five decades changing the lives of seemingly everyone he met.
Texas science fiction authors Nicky Drayden and Christopher Brown contemplate the future of writing about the future.
By Jeff Salamon
The coffee table book ‘Marfa Gardens’ proves that there’s more to desert flora than cactus and agave.
By Jeff Salamon
A new book celebrates a pair of well-established African American and Latino communities that are disappearing from Texas’s fastest-growing city.
By Jeff Salamon
The story behind the story behind Austinite Mike Shea’s three seconds of international fame.
By Jeff Salamon
The UT professor and longtime ’Texas Monthly’ contributor died on Saturday at the age of 79 after a stroke.
By Jeff Salamon
Randy Kennedy on the Texas locales that helped shape his debut novel.
By Jeff Salamon
The Austin thriller writer Meg Gardiner explains her connections to the Golden State Killer and the Oklahoma City bombing.
By Jeff Salamon
Donald Trump has profoundly discouraged people from coming over our borders. But is his influence wearing off?
By Jeff Salamon
An Austinite misses the beach, but doesn't want to be a bother.
By Jeff Salamon
In his new book, Robert D. Hodge explores the Texas borderlands through the seven generations of his ranching family.
By Jeff Salamon
Author Adam Sternbergh tells us how a Canadian-raised Brooklynite wrote a book set in West Texas.
By Jeff Salamon
The McConaughey flowchart to end all flowcharts.
By Emily McCullar and Jeff Salamon
Summer reading—Texas style.
By Jeff Salamon
Willie Beeley and Billy Stoner have never met. But from a distance, the two musicians might be the same person.
By Jeff Salamon
It was the best of covers, it was the worst of covers.
By Jeff Salamon
Nobody knows the coleslaw.
By Jeff Salamon
The best books by and for Texans coming out in June 2017.
By Jeff Salamon
One man’s crazy quest to conquer the culinary capital of the world with smoked brisket.
By Jeff Salamon
The numbers behind our May issue.
By Jeff Salamon
It's not New York or L.A. or Austin, but here's why Midlake front man Eric Pulido calls Denton home.
By Jeff Salamon
Cornyation, lampooning San Antonio's social elites since 1951.
By Jeff Salamon
Over the past 23 years, the founding director of the Michener Center for Writers has helped launch countless literary careers. Here are a few of the program’s most notable graduates.
By Jeff Salamon
One question with the executive producer of 'The Son.'
By Jeff Salamon
A typical morning for William McRaven.
By Jeff Salamon
George W. Bush, portraitist.
By Jeff Salamon
George Saunders explains how writing about Trump voters and writing a novel required the same skill: understanding people you don’t agree with.
By Jeff Salamon
Paulette Jiles wasn't born in Texas, but she started writing novels set here as fast as she could.
By Jeff Salamon
The incandescent unreality of Rocky Schenck is on display in the photographer's second collection.
By Jeff Salamon
The dean of Dell Medical School wants to reinvent health care for the twenty-first century.
By Jeff Salamon
A new biography takes a hard look at our forty-third president’s foreign policy record, with assessments that often stand in stark contrast with Bush's own verdict on his presidency.
By Jeff Salamon
Getting wet, getting scared, and getting my family a little closer to Texas at Schlitterbahn.
By Jeff Salamon
Justin Cronin on Texas, our toxic environment, and the long-awaited finale to his best-selling science-fiction trilogy.
By Jeff Salamon
In-migration, by the numbers.
By Jeff Salamon
Illustration by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Click to enlarge.When Governor Greg Abbott announced, in the wake of the November terrorist attacks on Paris, that Texas would not accept any new Syrian refugees, he was flouting the law of the land: the placement of refugees within the United States
By Jeff Salamon
MBAs Across America CEO and co-founder Casey Gerald explains why it’s hard to change the world.
By Jeff Salamon
Carrie Rodriguez’s new album finds her delving deep into her family history.
By Jeff Salamon
In 1975 the estate of J. Frank Dobie (1888–1964) established an endowment that would allow the University of Texas Press to keep his books in print for decades to come. Forty years later, the arrangement is still in place, and the press annually sells thousands of copies of
By Jeff Salamon
A death penalty in decline.
By Jeff Salamon