Features

Larry McMurtry's birthday is June 3, so we're celebrating with a list of a few of our favorite Westerns! Not all of these are traditional Westerns –– some subvert the setting, some the cowboy archetype, some the purpose of the protagonist. But they have a sense of landscape that is unique to the Western genre and typified by Larry McMurtry's many novels.

Joy: I’m here with Ülrika, our gift buyer. We are discussing Neverworld Wake, by Marisha Pessl!

Marisha is coming to the store on June 12, so we’re all really really really excited about that. It was Ülrika who put Night Film in my hands, which is her previous, wonderful (enormous) novel. So Ülrika was really excited to talk about Neverworld Wake with me. There’s so much we can’t give away, or we would let you know exactly what happens!

Ülrika, If you were selling this to me, what would you give me as the four-sentence pitch?

We were honored to host Paula McLain at the store last week for her new book, LOVE AND RUIN. Her last book, THE PARIS WIFE, was an international bestseller, and LOVE AND RUIN returns to the theme of Hemingway –– but through the lens of his second wife and famed war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn.

Couldn't attend? Listen to our audio recording of the event below!

Today, I'm honored to spotlight a book from beyond the northern border: Julie Demers' Little Beast, out from Canada's Coach House Books last month! Little Beast is, in fact, a little beast. At about 150 pages, it clocks in as a fairly quick read. However, Several of our staff members were bowled over by this small volume immediately. It merges fairy tale with adventure story, all seen through the eyes of a small girl with a full beard who must protect herself from suspicious townsfolk.

Keaton: Instead of leading with the obligatory "why did you write a prison novel" question, I’d like to know how the subject of prison might have altered your writing. Your first two novels are expansive, even global narratives, where the setting of The Mars Room is by its very nature confined and cut off from the larger world. Did this necessitate a different approach for you? How so?

Bianca Stone is a Brooklyn-based poet and visual artist. As soon as we got in her new book, we knew we needed to chat! We sat down with Stone recently to talk about her new poetry collection, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, Feb 2018), purgatory, death, family trauma, and stripping.

For the month of May at Brazos Bookstore, we’re championing Basic Black with Pearls as our Brazos Best. It’s a fever dream of a book, featuring a surreptitious affair, world travel, an undocumented main character (Shirley), mathematical codes in magazines, a mysterious organization known as The Agency, and a momentous visit to Toronto (Shirley’s childhood town). It’s poignant and disorienting, and yet incredibly readable.

Click here to watch our May Buyer's Corner!

Featuring our events with Joe Holley, Paula McLain, and Rachel Kushner.

We are so excited to be able to host Ana Emilia Felker, student of University of Houston's new Ph.D. program in Spanish with a Concentration in Creative Writing (Concentración en Escritura Creativa en Español-PhD/ECE). She is also the author of the new Aunque la casa se derrumbe, a series of genre-blurring essays about Mexico City. Before we host her for a presentation on May 5, I was able to ask a few questions and get a sense of what to expect from the lovely new book.

Yoko Tawada is a spectacular writer of both Japanese and German, and has received iconic literary prizes in both places (Akutagawa Prize, Goethe Medal, and more). She writes across genres and geographies in a way that manages to pick playfully from each; for example, in THE NAKED EYE, her protagonist is a young Vietnamese woman who ends up, kidnapped, in cold war-era Europe, obsessed with a film star.