From the Editors

Spring greetings from the shiny new editorial team at Review of Texas Books! Since the departure of our former editor, the singular and much-missed Jennifer H. Ravey, we have been planning, curating, and designing this issue and forthcoming ones. We thank you for your continued patronage of the Review and hope you will share it with all the readers in your life. We have decided to continue as an annual digital publication issued in early spring; we will carry forward our tradition of offering a handful of reviews “from the backlist” but will primarily print reviews of books published in the previous year.

In 2023, dear Texans, we read on through unprecedented headlines of war, strikes, felony indictments and convictions of high-level government leaders, Twitter’s rebranding, failing banks, and The Eras Tour. We read about shifting geohistorical landscapes in John S. Wilson’s Mapping Texas and shifting political landscapes of Reconstruction in Robert J. Dillard’s Two Counties in Crisis. We read of racially coded Ranger justice in the biographies of John B. Denton, by Mike Cochran, and Leander McNelly, by Tom Clavin. We heard Latino voices speak of the terrors of cartel violence and immigration in A Night of Screams, a horror anthology edited by Richard Z. Santos.

We read on, through another year of aggressive book banning activity in our state, of subjects academic, polemic, and poetic, while legislative and judicial bodies grappled over Texas H.B. 900 – not only its onerous implications for libraries and students in our state, but also its imperilment of the specific, protected freedoms of all writers and readers. January 2024 brought triumph for book activists and for First Amendment rights as a federal court ruled the ironically-named READER law and its anti-book machinations unconstitutional.

And so, in 2024, a reader in Texas may marvel – even as books are martyrized in pyres all around us – that champions of free speech are acting, the constitution is still working, words are still winning, and our state remains a wildly literary land. In such a complicated and spectacular place, we depend more than ever upon the advocacy and awe of art, and Texas continues to produce some of the greatest writers and writing in the world. We celebrate some of it here, and we look forward to another enriching year of reading and global citizenship with you.

Casey, Adam, & Lily

Casey L. Ford and Adam Nemmers, Editors
Lily Yoder, Editorial Assistant

Books in Review