Nell'estate del 1952, a Oklahoma City, un leopardo scappa dallo zoo cittadino, gettando la città nel caos e segnando per sempre la vita del piccolo Grady McClarty, di appena cinque anni. È la scintilla per mezzo della quale Stephen Harrigan, ricordando la sua infanzia, ci trascina nell'America degli anni Cinquanta sospesa tra le scorie della seconda guerra mondiale ancora da smaltire e le discriminazioni razziali ancora radicate. La storia si muove tra l'innocenza dello sguardo infantile di Grady e la complessità delle condizioni in cui vive la comunità che lo circonda. La scrittura, al tempo stesso lirica e coinvolgente, regala al lettore un'immersione autentica in quegli anni, dove ogni dettaglio - dagli odori estivi alle tensioni della comunità - prende vita con straordinaria vividezza.

STEPHEN HARRIGAN is the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including the award-winning novels The Gates of the Alamo and Remember Ben Clayton and the critically acclaimed essay collection The Eye of the Mammoth. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly and a faculty fellow at the University of Texas’s Michener Center for Writers.

Originally published in 1984, Stephen Harrigan’s passionate, emotionally intense second novel takes readers deep into the mysterious passageways of a Central Texas aquifer—and of the human heart. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

The urge to ride a wave, the search for the next perfect swell, is an enduring preoccupation that draws people to coastlines around the world. In recent decades, surfing has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry with over three million surfers in the United States alone and an international competitive circuit that draws top surfers to legendary beaches in Hawaii, California, and Australia. But away from the crowds and the hype, dedicated surfers catch waves in places like the Texas Gulf Coast for the pure pleasure of being in harmony with life, their sport, and the ocean. Kenny Braun knows that primal pleasure, as both a longtime Texas surfer and a fine art photographer who has devoted years to capturing the surf culture on Texas beaches. In Surf Texas, he presents an eloquent photo essay that portrays the enduring fascination of surfing, as well as the singular and sometimes unexpected beauty of the coast. Texas is one of the top six surfing states in America, and Braun uses evocative black-and-white photography to reveal the essence of the surfers’ world from Galveston to South Padre. His images catch the drama of shooting the waves, those moments of skill and daring as riders rip across the breaking face, as well as the downtime of bobbing on swells like seabirds and hanging out on the beach with friends. Braun also photographs the place—beaches and dunes, skies and storms, surf shops, motels, and parking lots—with a native’s knowing eye for defining details. Elegant and timeless, this vision of the Texas Coast is redolent of sea breezes and salt air and the memories and dreams they evoke. Surfer or not, everyone who feels the primeval attraction of wind and waves will enjoy Surf Texas.

In four decades of writing for magazines ranging from Texas Monthly to the Atlantic, American History, and Travel Holiday, Stephen Harrigan has established himself as one of America’s most thoughtful writers. In this career-spanning anthology, which gathers together essays from two previous books—A Natural State and Comanche Midnight—as well as previously uncollected work, readers finally have a comprehensive collection of Harrigan’s best nonfiction. History—natural history, human history, and personal history—and place are the cornerstones of The Eye of the Mammoth. But the specific history or place varies considerably from essay to essay. Harrigan’s career has taken him from the Alaska Highway to the Chihuahuan Desert, from the casinos of Monaco to his ancestors’ village in the Czech Republic. Texas is the subject of a number of essays, and a force in shaping others, as in “The Anger of Achilles,” in which a nineteenth-century painting moves the author despite his possessing a “Texan’s suspicion of serious culture.” Harrigan’s deceptively straightforward voice, however, belies an intense curiosity about things that, by his own admission, may be “unknowable.” Certainly, we are limited in what we can know about the inner life of George Washington, the last days of Davy Crockett, or the motives of a caged tiger, but Harrigan’s gift—a gift that has also made him an award-winning novelist—is to bring readers closer to such things, to make them less remote, just as a cave painting in the title essay eerily transmits the living stare of a long-extinct mammoth.

Francis "Gil" Gilheaney is a sculptor of boundless ambition, but bad fortune and pride have driven him and his long-suffering daughter Maureen into artistic exile in Texas just after World War I. When an aging rancher commissions Gil to create a memorial statue of his son who was killed in action, Gil believes it will be his greatest achievement. But as work proceeds on the statue, Gil and Maureen come to realize that their new client is a far more complicated man than they ever expected, and that he is guarding a secret that haunts his relationship with his son even in death.

A powerful new novel from the author of the best-selling The Gates of the Alamo.

Francis “Gil” Gilheaney is a sculptor of boundless ambition, whose pride has driven him from New York into artistic exile in Texas just after World War I. His adult daughter, Maureen, serves as her father’s assistant, her own artistic ambitions set aside for his. When Lamar Clayton, an enigmatic, taciturn rancher, offers Gil a commission to create a memorial statue of his son, Ben, who was killed in the war, Gil seizes an opportunity to create what he thinks will be his greatest achievement.

As work proceeds on the statue, it becomes clear to Gil and Maureen that Lamar is guarding a secret that haunts his relationship with Ben even in death. But Gil is haunted as well: by the fear that his work will be forgotten and by a lie whose discovery could cost him his daughter’s love. As the novel unfolds, we are given a brilliant evocation of the brutal aftermath of World War I, and a deeply moving story about the bonds between fathers and children, and the purpose and power of art.

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 CBS debut of the multi-award-winning miniseries Lonesome Dove, UT Press is pleased to issue a commemorative edition of A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove. This edition features a new deluxe dust jacket with new photographs of Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, as well as a specially designed twenty-year commemorative sticker. With 25,000 copies of the regular edition sold, this anniversary edition--which is limited to 5,000 copies--will surely become a collectible.

Lonesome Dove--Larry McMurtry's epic tale of two aging Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle 2,500 miles from the Rio Grande to Montana to found the first ranch there--captured the public imagination and has never let it go. The novel, published in 1985, was a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. More than two decades after publication, it still sells tens of thousands of copies every year. The Lonesome Dove miniseries, which first aired on CBS in 1989, lassoed an even wider audience. Twenty-six million households watched the premier episode, and countless millions more have ridden with Gus and Call each time the movie has rerun on TV, video, and DVD. In addition to its popular success, the miniseries has also garnered unanimous critical acclaim. It was nominated for eighteen Emmy Awards and won seven. It also won Golden Globe Awards for Best Television Miniseries and Best Actor; a Peabody Award; the D. W. Griffith Award for Best Television Series; the National Association of Television Critics Award for Program of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Drama; and the Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay (Bill Wittliff). Now bringing the sweeping visual imagery of the miniseries to the printed page, A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove presents more than one hundred classic images created by Bill Wittliff, the award-winning writer and executive producer (with Suzanne de Passe) of Lonesome Dove and a renowned fine art photographer. Wittliff took these photographs during the filming of the miniseries, but they are worlds apart from ordinary production stills. Reminiscent of the nineteenth-century cowboy photographs of Erwin Smith and the western paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, each Lonesome Dove image stands alone as an evocative work of art, while as a whole, they provide a stunning visual summary of the entire miniseries. Accompanying the photographs are a foreword by Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry and an introduction by Stephen Harrigan, who describes the epic-in-itself creative journey that led to the making of the Lonesome Dove novel, miniseries, and book of photographs. In the afterword, Bill Wittliff recalls unforgettable moments--some hilarious, others momentous--from the production of the miniseries. A roster of the cast and crew completes the text. As its enduring popularity proves, Lonesome Dove conveys the spirit of the American West and the freedom of the open plains and sky as few other creative works ever have. For everyone who loves the novel and the movie, A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove provides yet another powerful way of experiencing this mythical, yet wholly real, world.

“Compelling and moving…[At the story's heart] is the mystery of love and the relationship that exists between husband and wife, parent and child.” -- San Francisco Chronicle

“[Lucy Kincheloe] is a smart, ambitious woman torn between her career and her family…struggling to figure out what matters to her most.” -- The Washington Post Book World

“A fine, absorbing achievement…a stately novel whose emotional precision is matched by the exactitude of its prose.” -- The New York Times Book Review

“Epic in scope but human in scale, a tale of grand adventure packed with individual emotions.” -- Texas Monthly

“[I]ntriguing and thoughtful…under Harrigan's control, melodrama is stripped; he leaves enough spice to drive the human side of the plot while treating the science with respect and intelligence.” — The Chicago Tribune

"This is an intimate and soulful novel in which Harrigan balances love, family, and desire." -- Library Journal

“Rarely does a book ring as true as Challenger Park. The characters are as real as our friends, family, and co-workers. The story ropes us in from the start, but then guides us along rather than pulling tight. The writing is colorful when it needs to be, terse when it needs to be, and invisible when it needs to be–an art in itself.” -- Wichita Eagle

“Harrigan's precision reporting and lyrical writing make Challenger Park an absorbing read….If NASA ever decides to allow a writer on a space mission, my vote is for Stephen Harrigan.” — San Antonio Express News

“[A] finely crafted novel that gets to the core of what really matters in the end: friendship, family, and love….Novelists like John Updike, Ann Beattie and Anne Tyler–our leading chroniclers of the human heart–will need to make room for one more in their midst.” — New Jersey Star-Ledger

“[Harrigan] takes the well-trod landscape of suburban bedroom angst and gives it such a quirky makeover that the whole business of marital infidelity and family stability seems fresh…eminently readable.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch



From the author of the acclaimed and best-selling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what it's like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today's astronauts.

At the novel's center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.

Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son's asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant—perhaps unreachable—her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.

In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan's narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives—the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training—of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting—indeed a thrilling—novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.

Writing timeless essays that capture vanished worlds and elusive perceptions, Stephen Harrigan is emerging as a national voice with an ever-expanding circle of enthusiastic readers. For those who have already experienced the pleasures of his writing--and especially for those who haven't--Comanche Midnight collects fifteen pieces that originally appeared in the pages of Texas Monthly, Travel Holiday, and Audubon magazines. The worlds Harrigan describes in these essays may be vanishing, but his writing invests them with an enduring reality. He ranges over topics from the past glories and modern-day travails of America's most legendary Indian tribe to the poisoning of Austin's beloved Treaty Oak, from the return-to-the-past realism of the movie set of Lonesome Dove to the intimate, off-season languor of Monte Carlo. If the personal essay can be described as journalism about that which is timeless, then Stephen Harrigan is a reporter of people, events, and places that will be as newsworthy years from now as they are today. Read Comanche Midnight and see if you don't agree.