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Texas Review Press Announces 2013 Releases
Nov. 20, 2013
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
Story By: Chris Foster
Just in time for the holidays, Texas Review Press at Sam Houston State University has released its fall 2013 books, with a lineup that includes collections of short stories, poems, novellas and novels.
The 2013 releases include 12 books, published in both printed and eBook form, from award-winning authors on topics ranging from love and crime, to drug wars, to family and revenge, and the world of boxing, among many others.
Five-tie Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin’s Hide Island is an exploration of love and crime, memory and identity, abuse and redemption, and the contradictory battle between living lives worth remembering and the desire to break free from pasts we wish to forget.
Joyce Carol Oates praised Hide Island in Newsweek’s The Daily Beast by saying “What Edgar Allen Poe did for the psychotic soul, Richard Burgin does for the deeply neurotic who pass among us disguised as so seemingly ‘normal’ we may mistake them for ourselves.”
The Boston Globe proclaimed that “Burgin’s tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice.”
From author Tim Parrish, winner of the 2012 George Garrett Fiction Prize, comes an old-fashioned, modern novel that is both dark and funny.
The Jumper features Jimmy, an orphan who has grown up on a West Texas ranch, who is summoned to Baton Rouge to learn of his strange past. Jimmy struggles with his fear of falling in love and his complicated family history, which is filled with racial ambiguity and deceit.
Kirkus Reviews touts The Jumper as “a refreshing—at times inspirational—debut collection about hardworking people trying to do the right thing.” The New York Time Book Review said that “Baton Rouge asserts a harsh influence over the men whose stories make up Tim Parrish’s impressive first collection. The nine stories here are uniformly absorbing and original. With subtle irony and spare prose Parrish evokes the hard-won strength of the people who live in Baton Rouge.”
Harlow, by 2010 George Garrett Fiction Prize winner David Armand, tells the story of 18-year-old Leslie Somers, a young man who trudges his way through the dark Louisiana backwoods in search of his father during the winter.
Leslie, forsaken by his mother, finds his father, Harlow, and the two end up on a crash course toward crime, destruction, and twisted relationships that will leave one man dead, the other hardly recognizable from his former self.
Armand’s writing has been described by Tim Gautreaux as “a powerful Southern brew of violence and religion. The writing is intense, fast-paced, linguistically rich, well crafted, and ultimately riveting.”
Mariguano, by Juan Ochoa, is a story of drug wars, border violence, and coming of age in a gang family.
Mariguano tells the story of contrabandisto Don Julio Cortina and his ill-fated attempt to secure the Plaza at a national level by fixing the 1988 Mexican Presidential elections through the eyes of his son, Johnny. Mariguano gives a great understanding of the tragedy of modern-day Mexico and America’s complicity in the Mexican drug wars by blending classic crime narrative with Mexican and Latin American features.
Howard Campbell, author of Drug War Zone, has said that “Mariguano is the first novel in English to capture what it feels like to live on a day-to-day basis in the world of Mexican drug trafficking organizations.” Daniel Chacón writes that “Ochoa’s first novel is an important debut in American letters. The story is gripping, the characters compelling, and it gives us a fascinating glimpse into a world we only see in headlines.”
Texas Review Press reveals its sixth poetry anthology, featuring a comprehensive representation of Southern poets from Tennessee. The Southern Poetry Anthology VI: Tennessee brings together poems that engage the storied histories, diverse cultures, and vibrant and rural landscapes of the region.
More than 120 poets are featured in The Southern Poetry Anthology VI: Tennessee, including Pulitzer and Bollinger Prize-winner Charles Wright, Bittingham Award-winner Lynn Powell, and Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize-winner Rick Hills and Arthur Smith.
The collection includes an introduction by renowned poet Jeff Daniel Marion, recipient of the first literary fellowship from Tennessee Arts Commission in 1978.
The anthology will stand for many years as the definitive poetic document for the state of Tennessee, and the series has already found its way into university classrooms across the South, according to TRP director Paul Ruffin.
Texas Review Press also presents Joseph D. Haske’s debut novel, North Dixie Highway, in which Haske brings new life and a unique voice to the fiction of rural America.
North Dixie Highway is a story of family bonds, devolution, and elusive revenge. When Buck Metzger’s childhood is interrupted by the disappearance of his grandfather, his family and close friends plot revenge on the suspected killer.
From remote towns in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to war-torn Bosnia, Metzger struggles for self-identity and resolution in a world of blue-collar ethics and liquor-fueled violence.
Richard Burgin, five-time Pushcart Prize winner, called North Dixie Highway “lyrical, passionate, unflinching.”
“Joe Haske’s fiction grabs hold of you and shakes you to your core. He is one of the most exciting young American writers of his generation,” Burgin said.
Adam Berlin, winner of the 2012 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, writes a tale of friendship, ambition, and violence set against the world of boxing, a place where bodies get tested and truth is exposed.
Both Members of the Club is about Billy Carlyle, a professional fighter who is starting to lose. His eyes cut too easily and his friends—Gabriel, an aspiring actor, and Sam, an artist preparing for her first gallery show—try to persuade Billy to leave the ring in order to save him.
About the novel, Clay Reynolds said, “This astonishing personal and touching account of a trio of friends who have emerged from a parentless, family-less childhood to form a lifetime bond is reminiscent of the best of short fiction from the previous century.”
Jeff Worley, winner of the 2012 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, brings a collection of poems that are both clever and self-aware in A Little Luck, in which Worley’s dark humor and smart phrasing bring an elegant experience through his poetry.
Sandra Beasley, final judge for the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, said A Little Luck “presents that rarest of commodities—a voice encyclopedic in its attentions, clever, self-aware, and deeply likeable.
Worley’s humor throughout is dark and smart, his phrasings elegant…I’d give this book to the reader who does not yet realize he loves poetry.”
Lost & Found—written by David Lanier, winner of the 2012 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize—is an 18-poem collection that recalls a boy’s childhood and coming-of-age in a small town in the rural Southeast during the 1960s.
Lanier’s poems attempt not only to revisit was has been “lost,” but to “find” the emotional meaning and significance of the people, objects, and things of nature that populate his memory.
Larry D. Davis, final judge for the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize, said that “the seemingly simple and direct diction of these exquisitely crafted poems belies the wisdom, insight, and epiphanies looming beneath their crystalline surfaces.”
The Waiting Girl, written by Texas Review Press Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Georgia author Erin Ganaway, explores the exterior and interior landscapes that make up one’s identity, specifically celebrating the Appalachian South and Cape Cod as it carries readers from the cracked red earth of Georgia to the cobblestone streets of Nantucket.
Ganaway delves into the nuances of mania and melancholia through her bold depiction of environments and the illumination of bittersweet nature of bipolar disorder, raising awareness of this misunderstood state of being.
Michael Lieberman, author of the new book Bonfire of the Verities, offers a new set of poems that begs the question: Do things truly speak for themselves?
The language of Bonfire of the Verities is that of doubt and the commitment to cast aside the apparent truths we all accumulate. Those verities are what author Lieberman has tossed onto the bonfire.
Finally, Richard Boada brings a new set of brilliant and self-effacing poems in his new book The Error of Nostalgia.
His poems explore the relationships between individuals and their natural and urban environments in the American South and South America, locations that serve as sites where humans face the dangers of catastrophes, expatriation, crises of identity, and urbanization.
Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, said that “the poems in Richard Boada’s The Error of Nostalgia are quick and tactile, moving through landscapes of histories with the speed of fresh recognition, what Brodsky called the ‘accelerated thinking’ of poetry.” William Wright, author of Night Field Anecdote and Bledsoe, believes that “these poems brim with sonic lushness, with musicality, and with a delicacy that reminds me of James Wright and Louse Glück. However, Boada’s poetry is his own: complex, pulsing, curious, and always surprising.”
More details are forthcoming on the TRP website at shsu.edu/~www_trp or by calling the Texas Review Press office at 936.294.1992.
Texas Review Press is a member of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium.
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