News about People You Know - Robert Phillips

News About People You Know.

By Robert Phillips. Huntsville: Texas Review Press (dist by TAMU), 2002. 1-881515-45-1 paperback $18.95 5 ½ x 8 ½ . 200 pp. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/

Folks like William Goyen and Joyce Carol Oates like Robert Phillips’ writing, and so do I. Although originally a Delawarian, you may have noticed his occasional poetry reviews in the Houston Chronicle, and he’s served some time at the Texas Review literary journal up in Huntsville. For a while he directed UH Creative Writing Program where he now teaches as a Moores Scholar, and now well honored and awarded.

Most of his short works feature a Yankee fellow named Fallick, as is the case in News About, but some feature Texas venues. “May Day” features a Houston ham delivery man who meets up with a long lost attraction in a ritzy neighborhood, and they teeter on the edge of exposure. In a short, short scene of Laredo, “Jackhammer,” a youngster flitters on the edge of sexual awareness. In “Outsider” an Easterner in Texas struggles with his role as the newly comfortable facing the others’ struggle for survival amidst Halloween trivialities.

Finally, in “Rapture” a southwestern Texan and law enforcement officers sort out his wife’s sudden “ascension” and death on the highway in view of inflatable women drifting skyward, hilarious.

http://www.uh.edu/cwp/faculty/phillips.htm

Texas Heat - William Harrison

Texas Heat

by William Harrison. Huntsville, Texas Review Press, 2005. ISBN 1-881515-84-2, paperback. $18.95. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/

The review of this love and loving short story collection is in the Texas Parlor blog (http://texasparlor.blogspot.com/ for October 4th). It’s an audio. I was a bit timid about writing about, well, you know. But apparently, people do these sorts of things in Texas. As I posted this entry there, my service provider notified that it would not longer be available to post audio postings. So, what you get is the unedited, hurried, first recording, maybe not unlike, well, you know. I speak nervously from a script for about 5 minutes.

Western Story - Jon Tuska

Jon Tuska’s new edition of his anthology The Western Story: A Chronological Treasury (University of Nebraska, 1995, updating the earlier 1982) contains 20 stories (most not in the previous edition) grouped by named time periods: “The East Goes West,” “Founders of the Golden Age,” “Storytellers of the Golden Age,” and “Visions of Dreams and Dancing.” Only two stories have genuine Texas connections, and both are in the last time slot: Elmer Kelton’s 1982 “Desert Command,” a military story of a thirst-driven command set around San Angelo, and Texas-born Cynthia Haseloff’s 1994 “Redemption at Dry Creek,” set in a generic dry country featuring human conditions in response to earlier killing and hard life.

While reading Tuska’s introduction, readers will notice the dates marking the inauguration of the modern Western story are scattered in the 1890s and spilling into the first decade of the 1900s. Some of the authors mentioned in the introduction or cited in the final bibliography of the period are Owen Wister, Rex Beach, Jack London, Marah Ellis Ryan, Stewart Edward White, Mark Twain, Frederick Remington, Bret Harte, John Neihardt, Clarence Mulford, B.M. Bowers (a woman), and Texans Andy Adams and O. Henry. Tuska mentions that this edition’s collection is different from the previous and from other Western anthologists.