Texas

Texas writers work at a scale the state itself suggests: sprawling cities, small towns with long memories, ranch land, oil money, church pews and dance halls. The authors from Texas gathered here run from Houston and Austin to the Panhandle and the Hill Country, and they write crime, romance, family saga, literary fiction and faith. If you want writers who put the place on the page rather than using it as scenery, this is the shelf.

Set Texas beside California, Florida or New York and the difference is where the writing comes from. Bryan Washington writes Houston and its refineries, its immigrant kitchens, its buses. May Cobb and Shaun Hamill work small-town East Texas, where the heat and the church and the family money press on everyone. Stacey Swann and Stephen Harrigan take the same ground back into ranch land and old feuds. Jodi Thomas writes the rural romance of the Panhandle and the Hill Country. Amy Gentry and Eileen Myles come at it from Austin and from a life lived outside the state's expectations. Max Lucado writes for the churchgoing reader, Brian T. Atkinson for the one who follows songwriters. What they share is scale: a state big enough that a novel can stay inside one county and still feel like a whole country.