For the past several years, photographer, screenwriter, and author Bill Wittliff has been placing photographic paper inside beer cans, tubes made of PVC, and other cylindrical containers and affixing them to posts, trees, and other vertical supports on his Plum Creek Ranch near Luling, Texas. Wittliff pokes pinholes in the containers and allows the sun to “paint” on the paper over periods that can last anywhere from a few days to a year. The resulting solargraphs are, as art photographer K...

When last we saw the boy Papa in The Devil’s Backbone, he had finally learned the fate of his missing Momma and his vicious daddy, Old Karl. But hardly has he concluded that quest before another one is upon him. Now a white-haired man with a hangman’s noose around his neck and death in his eye—o’Pelo Blanco—is coming. And he means to hang Papa.In The Devil’s Sinkhole, the master storyteller Bill Wittliff takes us on another enthralling journey through wild and woo...

The Devil’s Fork opens with the boy Papa exclaiming, “They was gonna hang my o’Amigo Calley Pearsall out there in front a’the Alamo down in San Antoneya come Saturday Noon and if I was gonna stop it I better Light a Shuck and Get on with it. And I mean Right Now.” And so Papa and his sweetheart Annie Oster set off to rescue Calley, thereby launching themselves into another series of hair-raising adventures.The Devil’s Fork concludes the enthralling journey through...

The last the boy Papa saw of his Momma, she was galloping away on her horse Precious in the saddle her father took from a dead Mexican officer after the Battle of San Jacinto, fleeing from his Daddy, Old Karl, a vicious, tight-fisted horse trader. Momma’s flight sets Papa on a relentless quest to find her that thrusts him and his scrappy little dog Fritz into adventures all across the wild and woolly Hill Country of Central Texas, down to Mexico, and even into the realm of the ghostly “Shi...

A photo-filled behind-the-scenes journey into the creation of the book, the miniseries, and the world of Lonesome Dove.Widely acclaimed as the greatest Western ever made, Lonesome Dove has become a true American epic. Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel was a New York Times bestseller, with millions of copies in print, and the miniseries has won seven Emmys.In this treasury, John Spong talks to forty of the key people invo...

"Lansdale's best known—and frequently most disturbing—stories . . . sanctified in the blood of the walking Western dead and righteously readable." — The Austin ChronicleFrom the award-winning master of mojo storytelling, spinner of over-the-top yarns of horror, suspense, humor, mystery, science fiction, and even the Old West comes the first "true best of Lansdale" anthology. Sanctified and Chicken-Fried brings together a unique mix of well-known s...

The rich, complex lives of African Americans in Texas were often neglected by the mainstream media, which historically seldom ventured into Houston's Fourth Ward, San Antonio's East Side, South Dallas, or the black neighborhoods in smaller cities. When Bill Minutaglio began writing for Texas newspapers in the 1970s, few large publications had more than a token number of African American journalists, and they barely acknowledged the things of lasting importance to the African American commu...