Read a review of Literary Austin:

TEXANA: Texas writers view the city through fiction, nonfiction and poetry
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 6, 2007

Austin! Austin! Read all about it!
By TOM DODGE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Texas is commonly stereotyped in movies as a hick's paradise, but few if any states have a richer literary heritage and continuing array of accomplished authors. In Literary Austin Don Graham has compiled a sampling of them. Eighty-four are included here, with 34 more annotated in a selected bibliography. Many others, he writes in his introduction, live in Austin but haven't yet written about it, and others have but in a way that is not easily excerpted.
This is the sibling of Literary Fort Worth, also from TCU Press, published in 2002 . They have a similar look but little duplication. Only Gary Cartwright, Edwin "Bud" Shrake and Larry McMurtry, show up in both. Mr. Graham has developed, via nonfiction, fiction and poetry, a clear picture of Austin, its history and its present realities and postures.
We have two rock stories, Jan Reid's "Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock" and, by Wilson M. Hudson, "Bedichek's Rock." Ronnie Dugger holds forth on the Lyndon Johnson Library, Molly Ivins on the day Ann Richards whupped Clayton Williams. There's Robert Draper's too cool anti-tribute to Austin, "Adios Austin," John Spong's fascinating piece on the evolution of the Ransom Research Center at UT Austin, and lots and lots on Barton Springs and the University of Texas, including several on-the-scene tower massacre recollections.
There are five selections from the 1930s through the 1960s by or about J. Frank Dobie, the whiskey-drinking, pipe-puffing, church-cussing wilderness myth-man and his best friends, Roy Bedichek, who preferred the outdoors for bed and bathroom, and Walter Prescott Webb, poker player and lover of grass, not the rolling kind but bluestem, Indian and sideoats grama. Their books are classics, Mr. Bedichek's Adventures With a Texas Naturalist being, arguably, the one most read today.
Mr. McMurtry, who wrote that Austin is "the one town in the state where there is real tolerance of the intellectual," is said to have single-handedly, in the 1960s, closed the door on the Dobie school of un-ironic Texas literature.
Mr. McMurtry famously made irony and sociology popular in Texas literature, but who's responsible for its granola school of fiction? There's an awful lot of Whole Foods markets included here, chocolate Tofutti bars, yoga classes, mugs of hot soy milk sweetened with raw honey, Shiner Bock beer and vegetarians. Austinians are sensitive, in the know, and possibly wear their sweaters draped about their shoulders.
In a 2000 short story by Laura Furman, "The Woods," trendy Carlotta anguishes because her only child Josh may be scarred for life after seeing a dead body in the woods near their house as she herself has been scarred by seeing a naked man in childhood. This story's most interesting point, though, is its theme of replacement. The pioneers drove out the Comanches. Then the settlers came in. After that, came the influxers like Carlotta, who drove out the wildlife.
Mr. Dobie may have lacked irony but his skill for prophesy can't be faulted. After reading Mr. Webb's The Great Frontier Dobie wrote, "America has been consuming irreplaceable resources and prosperity based on such procedure cannot continue."
Which brings up a thematic thread of the past decade, the effect of overpopulation on water and air, and the choking of land and highway.
In the 1960s, Willie Morris wrote of Austin's "early fall, with that crispness in the air that awakened one's senses and seemed to make everything wondrously alive." Now, however, Austin's heat and traffic are the center of William Scheick's "Gridlock," Marian Winik's "The Texas Heat Wave," Andy Clausen's "Conversation With a Lady I Took to the Airport Who Loves Austin Texas," Joseph Jones' "Life on Waller Creek" and Lars Gustafsson's "From the Tale of the Dog."
Like the rest of us, Austinians evidently have all the steaming pavement, overpriced condos, big-hair houses and Hummers they need. It just bothers them more.

NPR commentator Tom Dodge, www.tomdodgebook.com, lives in Midlothian.
Literary Austin
Don Graham, editor
(TCU Press, $17.95)

 

Read what one of the contributors to Literary Austin had to say about the book:

I was in Book Stop the other day, saw the anthology, and bought a copy. Nicely done!  Thanks so much for including me in this fine volume.  My story ate up many precious pages, and I’m grateful that you used it. 
 
I loved your introduction, as always, and have read several of the early pieces, all of them first rate.  O. Henry was downright modern and zany. Frederic Prokosch was an unknown delight.  All of it is fascinating and rich.  I wonder if anyone outside of navel-gazing, self-absorbed Austin will find it as wonderful as I do....

You should be proud of this baby. Your thorough detective work at finding the best among the obscure is delightful, as usual.  The great fun of reading a Don Graham anthology is to be introduced to many, many excellent writers I’ve never heard of – or to discover the lesser known masterworks of writers I thought I knew.  Bravo once again!

--Tom Zigal, contributor to Literary Austin and author of the Kurt Muller mystery series.