Careless weeds

These novellas by acclaimed contemporary Texas writers present a rich chronological panorama of the social history of twentieth-century Texas. Set in the 1930s, Jane Gilmore Rushing's Wayfaring Strangers depicts the small-town folk of a West Texas community coming to terms with some "dark and different" strangers. In Margot Fraser's Hardship, a ranch family in the Big Bend country copes with the horrors of WWII, finding ultimately that some things endure. A former giant of a black man regains his stature and sense of purpose in David L. Fleming's The Sun Gone Down, Darkness Be Over Me, set in East Texas in the late 1950s. A group of boys is initiated into adulthood one summer in the early 1960s as their childish escapade in rural Texas explodes into violence in Clay Reynolds's Summer Seeds. Pat Carr's Bluebirds shows a woman struggling with the effects of the Vietnam war on her present husband, Hugh, and on Van, her ex-husband, as she comes to realize she must take charge of her own life. In Thomas Zigal's Second Lieutenants of Literature, a contemporary writer who's lost his nerve goes slightly berserk at a small college's literary festival. These six novellas illuminate, as all good fiction does, the human condition, moving the reader by their penetrating observations of human motivation and behavior.