HISD History Fair Guide

http://dept.houstonisd.org/curriculum/socialstudies/fair/historyguide.htm

Texas Book Festival Director Heidi Smith

Texas Book Festival Announces New Executive Director

The Texas Book Festival is pleased to announce the hiring of Heidi Marquez Smith as the new Executive Director.



She was hired from a national slate of candidates and will begin her tenure on March 3, 2008.

http://www.texasbookfestival.org/pdfs/new_ed.pdf

Houston Book Fair - Museum of Printing History

November 8, 2008 Houston TX

6th Annual Houston Book Fair10-5$5

Museum of Printing History, 713-522-4652, ext. 207

bookfair@printingmuseum.org

http://www.printingmuseum.org/

Houston Book, Postcard, & Paper Fair in Stafford

October 25-26, 2008

Houston Book, Postcard & Paper Fair
Stafford Center, 10505 Cash Road
Sat 10-5. Sun 10-4.40-

281-386-7998, 3107 Ann Arbor Ct, Sugar Land, TX 77478

DMPHouston@peoplepc.com

http://www.houstonshow.com/

North Texas Book & Paper Fair in Fort Worth

October 4-5, 2008, Fort Worth, TX

North Texas Book & Paper Fair
Sat 10-5. Sun 10-4
Will Rogers Complex, Round-up Inn,
3401 W. Lancaster Ave


texasbooksellers @ sbcglobal.net
http://www.texasbooksellers.org/

Fort Worth Book, Postcard & Paper Fair

May 31-June 1, 2008 Fort Worth, TX 4th Annual Fort Worth Book, Postcard & Paper Fair

Lockheed-Martin Recreation Center DM Promotions,
281-565-0771,
3107 Ann Arbor Ct,
Sugar Land, TX 77478

DMPHouston@peoplepc.com

http://www.houstonshow.com

What is Texana? Back across time. Barry Popik

http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/texana_or_texiana_or_texicana_all_things_texas/#When:23:37:01Z

Texas Institute of Letters 2008 Winners

http://texasinstituteofletters.org/TIL_winners_2008.htm

For the uncultured, unread, indeed, the unwashed, we have an institute to identify good book, good writing, and such. It's absolutely untrue that membership requires two levels of cousin in-breeding among the older members.

Longer commentary can be found in the Merschal's Dallas Morning News booksblog:
http://booksblog.guidelive.com/archives/2008/04/texas-institute-of-letters-win-1.html

Readers pleased with "Will's Texana Monthly" which last summer issued a "complete" list of winners from 1939 to present will be further pleased to find that list now generally replicated on the TIL web page. We thank TIL for taking up that responsibility.
http://texasinstituteofletters.org/TIL_Awards_Previous_Winners.htm

West Texas Book Festival Sept 23-27, 2008

West Texas Book and Music Festival, September 23-27, 2008

http://liswire.com/node/58

"Save the dates for the eighth annual West Texas Book and Music Festival, September 23-27, 2008 at the Abilene Civic Center in Abilene, Texas. Dr. Don B. Graham, a distinguished writer and teacher specializing in Texas and Southwest literature, will be the 2008 recipient of the A. C. Greene Award to be presented at the West Texas Book & Music Festival on Sept. 27."

"Other featured authors at this year’s festival will be: Elmer Kelton, Joaquin Jackson, and Mike Cox, who have all written books about the Texas Rangers; Kathy Patrick, author and organizer of The Pulpwood Queens reading club, featured on Good Morning America; and Amarillo novelist Jodi Thomas, whose new book Twisted Creek is being touted for community-wide reading programs."

Dobie's Paisano Fellows Awarded

J. Frank Dobie Paisano Fellowship are announced.


http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/Paisano/

Read more about it at:
http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/Paisano/features/pressrelease08-09.html

Johnston Fellow: "Michael Erard, holder of the Ralph A. Johnston Fellowship, was born in San Antonio, received a BA from Williams College in American Studies, and an MA in linguistics and a PhD in English, both from The University of Texas at Austin."
"The runners-up for the Ralph A. Johnston Fellowship are William Norris and H. L. Hix. Norris is a fiction writer and author of the critically acclaimed Snapshots. Hix is a distinguished poet whose latest book Chromatic was a National Book Award Finalist."

Jones Fellow: "Vanessa Ramos, holder of the Jesse Jones Fellowship, is a native of El Paso, Texas. She is a poet, playwright, and creative-nonfiction writer. As a McNair Scholar, she completed an ethnographic study (Women Between Earth and Sky) on curanderismo or folk-healing in the Southwest."
"The runners-up for the Jesse Jones Fellowship are William Norris (first runner-up for both fellowships) and Owen Egerton. Egerton is a fiction writer and author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection How Best to Avoid Dying."

Mark G. Mitchell - Texas Illustrator

http://www.markgmitchell.com/

Mark Mitchell is an excellent illustrator. His webpage gives you a partial introduction. E..G.

Raising La Belle

Seeing Stars: McDonald Observatory, Its Science and Astronomers

The Mustang Professor: The Story of J. Frank Dobie

Austin's Joe O'Connell is interviewed

http://straightfromhel.blogspot.com/2008/05/joe-oconnell-guest-author.html

Joe O'Connell is interviewed by in Straight from Hel

Will's Texana Monthly review his Evacuation Plan, a novel in stories, and found it quite insightful and worthwhile.

Al Dewlen's Bone Pickers - Review

Revival of Al Dewlen's 1958 "The Bone Pickers" novel. A review in the blog "One Word, One Rung, One Day." It seems the Amarillo family of the Mungers are disparate.

http://traviserwin.blogspot.com/2008/05/bone-pickers-my-town-monday-book-review.html

The "BP" has long been cited as an excellent novel.

Genuine turmoil over the book and the apparent parallel to a certain living family brought near calamity to the novel. Conspiracies abound, the book went suddenly scarce. The next year, 1959, it re-appeared, altered and under a new title, "The Golden Spread."


The side panel has an interesting list of "literary" blogs.

1996 Discussion of Texana Books etc.

Beginning August 8, 1996 in a Google group - Newsgroups: austin.general, rec.arts.books - a request for recommended Texas books led to a lively and sometimes informed and civil discussion with over 40 replies

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/browse_thread/thread/c1649a2c9de10df/0b5d4b31869f99e9?lnk=st&q=teaching+texas+history#0b5d4b31869f99e9

Pulpwood Queens Book Club

If the phrase "Pulpwood Queens Book Club"

is news to you, be informed that it's a runaway sawmill of East Texas (and now world wide) women who read books and talk. One of my Jefferson-native mother's book recommendations was Hershey's "Hiroshima." Apparently the women folks there read with a voracious criticism, and speak up in public about it. Seems it all got started in a beauty parlor; wouldn't you know it. And you though "Steel Magnolias" was the highpoint of that cultural nexus!

http://www.pulpwoodqueen.com/

Texas Mystery Month in May

Kevin Tipple's blog, "Kevin's Corner," obliged the Sisters and posted news of Texas Mystery Month at
http://kevintipplescorner.blogspot.com/2008/05/tenth-annual-2008-texas-mystery-month.html

"Sisters in Crime Heart of Texas Chapter is pleased to announce the Tenth Annual 2008 Texas Mystery Month in May. The purpose of Texas Mystery Month is to spotlight Texas Mystery Authors. Texas Mystery Month events include panel discussions, book signings, author presentations and more. Houston and San Antonio are joining Austin in celebrating Texas Mystery Month in May."

He carries the current calendar of events in major cities. Speakers include Laura Griffin, Earl Staggs, David Ciambrone, Ben Rehder, Marcia Spillers, Sylvia Dickey, Rick Riordan, and Barbara Burnett Smith.

Francine Richter on John Graves' Classicism

In the blog "The Way of the Goddess" she explores "A Siren Call: Fifty Years after John Graves’ Goodbye to a River

http://francinerichter.com/blog/2008/01/19/a-siren-call-fifty-years-after-john-graves-goodbye-to-a-river/

It's graceful retrospective and call to mix the Brazos with antiquarian waters. She concludes with 5 point to consider:

An examination of the novel; psychologically seductive
Feminist Environmentalism Naturalism
Classical literature origins for southwestern literature
Resurgence of the feminine; worship at the shrine of nature
Environmentalism
The Siren Call

Don Graham Observes Texas Literature

Don Graham, lead academician in Texas letters down at the University on the Colorado River, offers his corrective commentary, "Deathless Prose," in a recent Texas Observer, February 8, 2008 issue

http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2687

It's a good read. He ambles through John Graves, Elmer Kelton, Larry McMurtry, Dagoberto Gilb, glances at genderist writing and the rise of PETA values, connects with Betty Sue Flowers. Not to leave a sacred cow unshorn, along the way, he does mention UT's classless tuition and Texas Monthly's persistance in carrying some content between the advertisements. He rounds it out with mentions of international concerns of the French and Chinese.

Wikipedia: A Free Encyclopedia and Texas

WIKIPEDIA AND TEXAS

Broader searches

A search of Google for "Texas Wikipedia" brings almost 4,000,000 hits. This includes many entries from the various language variants of Wikipedia - Spanish to German to Indonesian. Spelling variation may explain why a Yahoo search is so different. Google's penchant to avoid showing page variations may also help this disparity.

However, a similar search of Yahoo bring almost 40,000,000 (yes 40) hits. You may prefer

Going directly to usual, English language Wikipedia where you'll find the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas
Using the typical search box at Wikipedia for the term "Texas" brings only 1 article - the usual long encyclopedia article on the topic (not the shorter one at Wiki's "Texas Portal." The search does not automatically bring you a list of all articles with that keyword.

Some of that main, long article's sections (littered with Wikipedia links) include
[A disambiguation link]
[Summary] and hot table of "Contents"
Etymology
History: Colonization, Independence, Statehood, Civil War, Reconstruction and disfranchisement, Modern Texas
Geography: Borders, Categorization, Geology
Demographics: Racial groups and ethnic origins, Religion, Cities and Towns, Colonias
Government and Politics: State government, Judicial System, Politics, Administrative Divisions
Economy
Culture: Arts, Sports
Transportation: Highways, Airports, Passenger Rail Transportation, Trans-Texas Corridor
Healthcare: Medical research
Education: Primary and secondary, Post-secondary
See Also
Footnotes
References
Further reading
External links


While this general enclopedic article is littered with links, there is a particular link that produces a list of about 500 "Texas-related topics" from Abilene to Renee Zellwenger:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Texas-related_topics

Further approaches to Wikipedia and Texas follow in other blog entries. Or retrieve them all by searching the Texas Parlor blog for "Wikipedia."

Wikipedia: WikiProject Texas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Texas

A WikiProject self-definition is
"This is a WikiProject, a collaboration area and open group of editors dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of a particular topic, or to organizing some internal Wikipedia process."

The WikiProject Texas is defined as:
"Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better organize information in articles related to the U.S. state of Texas. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there."
Scope: "This WikiProject aims primarily to expand Wikipedia's resources on Texas and present Texas in a fair and accurate manner."
Goals:
"To improve the quality and quantity of Texas related articles, as exemplified by the featured articles Galveston Hurricane of 1900; Ike Altgens; Texas Ranger Division; Marshall, Texas; Houston, Texas; 2005 Texas Longhorn football team; and Texas A&M University.
To present a holistic view of Texas rather than the view of one region of Texas.
To make Wikipedia one of the premier online resources on Texas.
Contribute to the Texas portal: WP:Texas "

A list of individual participants is available on the webpage.

One of the sub-projects is exemplified by Dallas-Fort Worth project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Dallas-Fort_Worth

Wikipedias Texas Lists

A List of Two Options for Finding Texas lists in Wikipedia

1. Surfers can use the Wikipedia search box for "Texas list" and discover that it finds over 18,000 hits, 500 of which are presented to observe. Apparently, if there is a page on which Texas is mentioned and a list accompanies, the entry appears. Many are duplicative in nature, but many are truly a list of something Texan. Using particular words, e.g., "Austin list" can produce others wherein the word Texas may not appear, some of which are applicable. Most are not found in Wikipedia's Category of "Texas-related lists" as more broadly explored below in option 2. Searching this first option can be useful to add to the second option.

2. One of Wikipedia's conceptual options is the "Category" of "Lists" of other lists of topics under a subject. Yes, that sounds a bit convoluted. One such List is the "Texas-related lists." Go to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Texas-related_lists

As of today, May 2, 2008, "The following 57 pages are in this category, out of 57 total. Updates to this list can occasionally be delayed for a few days. "

They're usually arranged alphabetically by keyword but you'll notice that several are filed under L, apparently for the keyword "List of ...."

Two lists are actually "Timelines," under that entry below.

A
List of Texas amphibians List of Texas area codes
B
List of Texas butterflies
C
List of cities in Texas List of counties in Texas Current and former railroad companies operating in Dallas, Texas
F
List of Farm to Market Roads in Texas
G
List of German Texans List of Governors of Texas
H
List of high schools in Texas List of hospitals in Texas
I
List of Interstate Highways in Texas
L
List of Austin neighborhoods List of Dallas-Fort Worth area colleges and universities
List of Dallas-Fort Worth area freeways List of Houston neighborhoods List of Presidents of the Republic of Texas List of Registered Historic Places in Texas List of Texas Governors and Presidents List of Texas county name etymologies List of Texas county seat name etymologies
List of Texas sports teams List of Texas state symbols List of Texas-related topics
List of U.S. Highways in Texas List of colleges and universities in Houston List of colleges and universities in Texas List of individuals executed in Texas List of largest Texas universities by enrollment List of mayors of Austin, Texas List of mayors of Dallas, Texas List of mayors of Fort Worth, Texas List of mayors of Houston List of mayors of Plano, Texas List of mayors of San Antonio, Texas
M
List of mammals in Texas List of Texas metropolitan areas List of military installations in Texas
N
List of neighborhoods in Dallas, Texas List of newspapers in Texas List of all newspapers in the United States List of city nicknames in Texas
P
List of people from Texas
R
List of Texas railroads List of Texas reptiles List of rivers of Texas List of the ten longest Texas rivers
S
List of school districts in Texas List of schools in Harris County, Texas List of state highway spurs in Texas List of state highway loops in Texas List of state highways in Texas List of Texas state parks
T
Timeline of the Republic of Texas Timeline of the Texas Revolution
V
List of Vice Presidents of the Republic of Texas
u
List of unincorporated communities in Texas

Do you have a list to share?

Wikipedia's Texas Portal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portal

A Wikipedia conceptual option is a "Portal." The self-definition is:

"The idea of a portal is to help readers and/or editors navigate their way through Wikipedia topic areas through pages similar to the Main Page. In essence, portals are useful entry-points to Wikipedia content.
Portals are subject to the five pillars of Wikipedia, and must comply with Wikipedia's core content policies like Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Verifiability.
At present, there are 115 featured portals, of a total of 548 portals on Wikipedia."

So, there is a "Texas Portal" is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Texas
at which you'll find there are also Portal for Houston, Dallas, UT-Austin, and U of Houston.

At that Texas Portal you'll fine a variety of search options. One of those options is the Category of "Texas Lists."

Texas Wikipedia Encyclopedia Collaboration

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Texan_Collaboration_of_the_Month#Selecting_the_next_Collaboration_of_the_Month

Among Wikipedia's options is the creation of a groups who wish to collaborate toward creating or improving particular topics or categories. "One such is the Texan Collaboration of the Month."

The self-description is "Every month, a Texan Collaboration of the Month will be picked using this page. This is a specific topic which either has no article or a basic stub page that is directly related to Texas, the aim being to have a featured-standard article by the end of the period, from widespread cooperative editing."

This month's collaborative effort is described as:
"The current Texan Collaboration of the Month is Marshall, Texas. Every month, a different Texas-related topic, stub or non-existent article is picked. Please read the nomination text and improve the article any way you can."

Go to Wikipedia for further info.

Texas Writers, Authors in Wikipedia

Texas Writers Category
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Texas_writers

Here's a list of about 100 Texas writers with their own Pages in Wikipedia. The implicit task is, well, Texan in dimension - not to mention who qualifies. The "Texas Portal" link is displayed to link you to a general article on Texas; it is not that fine group of University of North Texas librarian smoothing the wrinkles in the sheet of Texas time through their "Portal to Texas History," itself a broad and admirable effort.

Wikipedia, the community based international encyclopedia, includes the option of clustering topics for users convenience. This clustering or categorizing is called a "Category." One such category is "Texas Writers" which offers an opportunity for enrichment. As with other Wikipedia efforts, its improvement rests with users, as occasionally supervised by another participant. The current list is a good beginning. It does properly include William Goyen who has been slighted by some current raining critics of Texana. It does not include Cormac McCarthy whose writing is also refined and literary.

The lists includes novelists, journalists, folklorists, playwrights, essayists, and other idlers travelling under the social approbation of wordsmithery. Who is Paco Ahlgren? He's just a click away.

A
Paco Ahlgren Susan Wittig Albert Aaron Allston Ellis Amburn Dr. Moe Anderson Mechelle Avey
B
Neal Barrett, Jr. Gordon Baxter Roy Bedichek Raymond Benson Sarah Bird Jayme Lynn Blaschke Timothy Braun Walter H. Breen Sandra Brown Paul Burka James Lee Burke
C
Rachel Caine Candace Camp Matt Clark (writer) Ernest Cline Madison Cooper Richard L. Cox
Deborah Crombie
D
J. Frank Dobie Allen Drury
E
Lars Eighner Linda Ellerbee P. N. Elrod
F
James L. Farmer, Sr. John Henry Faulk O. C. Fisher Brian Floca Robert Flynn (author) Horton Foote Kinky Friedman
G
Gail Giles Fred Gipson William Goyen John Gray (U.S. author)
H
Leon Hale Brett Halliday Charles L. Harness Vicki Hearne Allison Hedge Coke Kate Heyhoe
Donna Hogan Kimberly Willis Holt Robert E. Howard James Hynes
I
Molly Ivins
J
Bret Anthony Johnston Tom Jones (writer)
K
Elmer Kelton Rick Klaw
L
Woodrow Landfair Joe R. Lansdale Christopher Largen James Lavilla-Havelin
Thomas C. Lea, III Cara Lockwood
M
Ardath Mayhar Larry McMurtry Judith McNaught
N
Chris Nakashima-Brown Warren Carl Norwood
O
Joe M. O'Connell Chad Oliver Karen Olsson William O'Neil
P
Lawrence Person D. T. Pollard Katherine Anne Porter
R
Karen Ranney Nancy Taylor Rosenberg Ron Rozelle
S
Dorothy Scarborough Harvey Schmidt Duane Simolke Skeeter Skelton Jimmy Starr
Bruce Sterling Whitley Strieber Katherine Sutcliffe Shanna Swendson
T
Jodi Thomas John Thomason Frank X. Tolbert Sergio Troncoso Lisa Tuttle
U
Jim Underwood Steven Utley
W
Howard Waldrop Linda Warren Joanna Wayne Don Webb Walter Prescott Webb
Janice Woods Windle Gene Wolfe Ramsay Wood M. K. Wren
Y
J. Lanier Yeates

Observer Observes McMurtry's Unnatural Observation on Place

The Texas Observer's role in disturbing the burial place of Texas literature is paid a light revivival within its "A Novelist in Full" by Azita Osamloo.

While pawing through the remains of a separate dilemma, Osamloo states,
"The dilemma calls to mind the 1981 Observer essay in which Larry McMurtry took his fellow Texas writers to task for “paying too much attention to nature, not enough to human nature.” "

Yes, that would partially account for McMurtry's differing sensibilities, his separation from nature, and his documentation of Texans' collective separation.

Now that our separation from nature is acknowledged by climate change, one wonders when our novelists will document our going back home again, back to the plains, the ponds, the forests, the highlands, and the marshlands.

Somewhere I seem to remember that I read an account of Edward Abbey, an, ahem, activitst environmentalist and writer, and that account included a portion of his childhood maybe in or around San Antonio in the custody of his mother and her some sort of emotionally intense religious committment. Could that intensive religiosity have transferred into his own firebrand label? If that were plausible, could we lay some claim to him as a Texas writer - that is, if his time here and some of his influences are significantly derived from here?

Such a connection, if we successful transit to it, may offer a basis for other surreal or otherwise odd literary passersby.

It's unfashionable to claim Conan the Barbarian as a Texan, despite the author's clear Texan citizenship and the outlandish bragadaccio of Conan being suggestive of the often larger-than-life Texan profile (even in something so simple as that Lions movie with the two brothers on their old Texas farm).

And there's Anne Rice and her previous vampirial narratives. She met and matured and married with a young Texan who went on to be a significant surrealist poet. She and he were close kins in their literature. Is vampirism so distant from surreal poetry? Her husband's Texas roots sucked up something to push him onward when "feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace" (terribly misquoting Browning). But could Anne have sunk her teeth properly without her Texas influence?

While Conan and vampires are beyond the realm of real nature, they are still bound to it by their very primitive and visceral existences - hence still deferring to nature.

Even Cormac McCarthy's work begins and lives deep within natural impulses and terrains - The Road being one of the ultimate places, merging the internal novel with the external.

Great Texas Novel - Part C

http://books.google.com/books?id=s2jHc_wmU3sC&pg=PA573&lpg=PA573&dq=%22Great+TExas+novel%22&source=web&ots=VpgSWUKiu6&sig=2rVPz_XdBz6hz03L4UJwi_f0zWk&hl=en

In the volume "Updating the Literary West" in article on John Graves (p. 573) Craig Clifford states "Every critical discussion of Graves writing, this one not excluded, finally turns to the question, will he ever put forward the Great Texas Novel (pace Larry McMurtry)."

What is Texas Literature?

If we're gonna talk Great Texas Novel, then "What is Texas Literature?" The blog "A Practical Policy" which normally focuses on Liberation Lit and the Middle East, explored the topic in October of 2006. It begins:

"The question is sometimes asked, What is Texas literature? Is there one? And the answer is sometimes that Texas literature is more of a national literature than anything else – perhaps given that Texas has three of the 9 or 10 largest US cities and its vast countryside and great ethnic and class diversity and other factors. Among other Texas surprises, I suppose, there’s a book coming out on an “Asian underground railroad” that once ran through El Paso, Texas."

Great Texas Novel - Part B

After the entry from the Campaign for the American Reader, I wondered about the phrase and, yes, searched Google, some of the results being:

http://www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/2006/wier.htm Tejano
"Tehano is a terrific novel, an epic tale of the Western frontier that is superior to Lonesome Dove: better written, more smoothly plotted, more historically accurate. It may well be the Great Texas Novel."—Dallas Morning News

http://www.forewordmagazine.com/articles/shw_article.aspx?articleid=177 Tejano
Tehano by Allen Wier (Southern Methodist University Press, 736 pages, hardcover, $27.50, 0-87074-506-9): Tehano has been cited as rivaling War and Peace in scale and Lonesome Dove in gripping reality. With the Texas Comanche territory as his arena and Antebellum days through Reconstruction as his timeframe, Wier tracks the destiny of a motley army of Americans—from displaced Northerners to desperate Okies. This is indeed the Great Texas Novel.

http://www.ninavida.com/ Texicans
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMANFREDERICKSBURG, TX NEWSBy Amanda Maria Morrison" Just when you thought the great Texas novel has already been written and any more attempts would be just running over the same armadillo again and again, comes the Texicans, a tremendous historical novel set in the aftermath of the Texas' independence and its burgeoning statehood. ...The author's ability to reveal the human heartache that plagued so many settlers in their cabins and on their ranches drives the novel's convincing plotlines........Vida's work should be placed on the same shelf with Lonesome Dove, Texas, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider. "

http://books.google.com/books?id=E3J21cztCHsC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123&dq=%22Great+TExas+novel%22&source=web&ots=6mE1PURAm4&sig=VTE5zfFa7BHZ3xf7P9d--9JjBhk&hl=en#PPA123,M1
Farther off from Heaven
In Bert Almon's "William Humphrey: Destoryer of Myths" regarding William Humphrey's "Farther," Almon invokes James Ward Lee's pamphlet on Humphrey as suggesting the volume is a great Texas novel.

A Sunday, October 30, 2005, opinion at the Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-clarke_30edi.ART0.State.Edition1.db82fc2.html
"Will Clarke: Beyond the Texas Myth: When Larry McMurtry bashed the state's literati, he must've been having one bad day" explores greatness.
A DMN sidebar asked for email suggests under the question: "Your Point: If a novelist tried to write the Great Texas Novel this year, what would it be about?

Quiet Bubble (Southern writing) explores, in July 2005, in a broader context, Texas great(?) novelists
http://quietbubble.typepad.com/quiet_bubble/2005/07/texas_writers_o.html
"Quick thinking: name four major Texas writers. By “Texas writer,” I guess I mean writers who grew up in Texas and/or writers who glean from the state for their themes, plots, geography, and moral frameworks.
After two days of back-and-forth emails with Ernesto and some web browsing, I came up with Katherine Anne Porter and Larry McMurtry. Donald Barthelme grew up in Houston, but he doesn’t count–when I think of him, I think of the hippest, strangest Greenwich Village insider you’d ever want to have a drink with, but Texas would never enter the conversation. I’ve heard the name Elmer Kelton batted around in a few newspapers, but I think he’s too obscure even for Bookforum.
So, two writers. That’s it. Why is that?"

Then Quiet Bubble goes further
http://quietbubble.typepad.com/quiet_bubble/2005/07/texas_writers_p.html
wherein he invokes Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" and Poppy Brite's "Prime" among others.
Others' added "Comments" go further.

Great Texas Novel

Campaign for t