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#2 – big wonderful thing by Stephen Harrigan – Best Reads of 2023
Mary Austin Holley, author of the first English history of Texas, (and cousin to Stephen F. Austin), said “One’s feelings in Texas are unique and original…and very like a dream or youthful vision realized.” (116) Many a Texas visitor or emigré has discovered the same thing about the state, despite its outsized contradictions. →
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#3 – All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby – Best Reads of 2023
What Cosby brings to the table is a landscape I know and love and people who are too often hidden in plain sight. And the context of his fiction is both as ancient as the Chesapeake and as contemporary as a black sheriff in a rural Southern backwater county. →
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#4 – The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Best Reads of 2023
Yeah, this Dostoevsky guy has got potential. →
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#5 – Lone Women by Victor Lavalle – Best Reads of 2023
Victor Lavelle’s Lone Women takes a real historical trend—single African-American women taking advantage of the Homestead Act to set up shop in the Big Sky country of the 1910s—and turns it into a compelling story of frontier relationships, corruption, and…well, yes, horror. →
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#6 – I, Julian by Claire Gilbert – Best Reads of 2023
The writing is simple and elegant. The characters illustrative of the times without being preachy. And the post-pandemic world Gilbert evokes is eerily similar to our own. →
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#7 – Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard – Best Reads of 2023
You won’t understand every move she makes. But like the moth that immolates itself in a flame in one of this book’s most memorable passages, you won’t be able to look away. →
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#8 – The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer – Best Reads of 2023
What did I know about Mailer? Well, he liked to write long books, could be insufferable and borderline lethal as a spouse, and absolutely chewed up the scenery wherever he appeared. What I discovered was that he was also an energetic and ambitious writer who could move a story along. →
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#9 – Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles – Best Reads of 2023
Paulette Jiles, with her poet’s eye, has a knack for writing books that feel small even when they’re about a place as vast as Texas. →
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#10 – 24 Hours in Charlottesville by Nora Neus – Best Reads of 2023
Charlottesville is still a mostly progressive city that sometimes fancies itself a small piece of the Northeast Corridor. But every so often we get painful reminders that this is still the South and there is much to do. This is the searing record of one of the most painful. →
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Heartlands 