Go with the Flow: Our Guide to Giving Books

We are all being bombarded with enticements to buy as holiday sales and the shopping season ramp up. Don't get overwhelmed! Get books for everyone on your list this year. Don't know where to start? Use this handy flowchart to find the best gift books for your family and friends (or for yourself! That is allowed.)

All books on our website are 33% off. Always. To ensure books arrive by Christmas Day, order by December 1 for international delivery and by December 15 for domestic delivery. Happy Shopping!

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Christmas came early for us this year! See if you can spot our incredible cookbook in Barnes and Noble's holiday ad.

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A Flatlanders-Inspired Driving Mix by John T. Davis

A car stereo, a great music mix, and a good long drive can put everything into perspective and nobody knows this truth better than West Texas musicians. Why? Well, let music writer John T. Davis explain through this ultimate West Texas driving mix inspired by the subject of his latest book, The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again. 

A West Texas Driving Mix
By John T. Davis

Route 66…That hard-assed Amarillo Highway…the Loop…the Strip…the Lost Highway…the Eight’r From Decatur…

Roads aren’t just strips of asphalt in West Texas—they are lifelines and metaphors and escape routes and the promise that lies somewhere over yonder. In a dusty and isolated landscape where so much seems fixed in place, there’s healing power in movement. Terry Allen, the artist and musician who has spent his creative life in a love/hate relationship with the Texas Panhandle and the South Plains once said, “No one with access to a car and a good radio station should ever need a psychiatrist.”

The Flatlanders, whose personal and musical journey I’ve chronicled in a new book, The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again, grew up driving the highways, ranch roads and farm-to-market byways that surrounded their home in Lubbock, Texas. The “road,” both literal and metaphorical, has always informed the music made by the group and by its three central figures—Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Even today, says Joe Ely, when he needs musical inspiration, he’ll take off and drive the grid of tiny back roads that thread their way across the empty plains. It’s a big, blank reservoir of silence, begging to be filled with music.

In that spirit, I’ve put together a mix tape for driving across the plains of West Texas—it’s been a long day behind the wheel, the sun is finally beginning to set and the lights of a small town glimmer on a distant, ruler-straight horizon. The road, as Tom Russell likes to sing, it gives, and the road it takes away.



Access the playlist on your Spotify account here.

“Amarillo Highway”—Terry Allen (from Lubbock On Everything): “I’m a high straight in Plainview/Side bet in Idalou/And a fresh deck in New Deal,” sings Allen against a honky-tonk piano and steel guitar. “Some call me high hand/And some call me low hand/But I’m holding what I am—the wheel.” US Hwy. 87, about which Allen was singing, has been supplanted by modern Interstate 27, but the groove is still the same.

“Rave On”—Buddy Holly (from the album The Buddy Holly Collection): Because, duh. Lubbock native Holly set the template for the modern rock band, scored huge hits, inspired the Beatles (and the Flatlanders) and became the first rock ‘n’ roll martyr, all by age 22. Roll down the window, crank it up and let ‘er rip.

UT Press at the 2014 Texas Book Festival

This weekend, the University of Texas Press and 13 of our authors will enjoy the 19th annual Texas Book Festival on the Capitol grounds in downtown Austin and environs. We're still pinching ourselves that Richard Linklater will be part of a panel for one of our books, Boyhood: Twelve Years on Film. We'll have a booth on Colorado Street with tons of titles for sale at a great discount, so please stop by. There are a lot of great authors in attendance this year, so we’ve distilled our authors' appearances into a single UT Press schedule (browse the full schedule here):

More info

Saturday

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Surf Texas

Author: Kenny Braun

Location: The Contemporary

Where to find the author online:
@KennyBraunPhoto | Facebook | Website

More info

11:45 AM - 12:45 PM

Olveta Culp Hobby: Colonel, Cabinet Member, Philanthropist
Author: Debra Winegarten

Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.016

Where to find the author online:
Author Guest Blog | @Winegarten | Website

1:00 - 2:00 PM

More info

The Devil’s Backbone
Author: Bill Wittliff
Location: Texas Tent

"This lively story, part novel and part yarn, is a fine read!"     ―Larry McMurtry

"Bill Wittliff’s The Devil’s Backbone is a wonderful tale that does honor to the ancient art of storytelling. It is destined to be an American classic."     ―Jim Harrison

"It’s mythic. It’s historic. It’s folk wisdom and wit. Best of all, it’s a master storyteller at the top of his game practicing the ancient art he heard as a kid growing up in Edna in the 1940s."     ―Jane Sumner, Austin American-Statesman

Fall 2014 Preview

This fall and winter, UT Press will publish very important works in photography, food, film and media studies, architecture, Latin American Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, including two new translations of provocative Lebanese texts by Rashid Al-Daif: Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep? and What Makes a Man?

More info

Not only do we have a memoir from a former Miss America, we're also publishing the first comprehensive examination of the Mr. America Contest by an acclaimed sports historian. Also this fall, a Cuban exile ponders the meaning of Mayberry, a veteran reporter for National Geographic and Newsweek provides a how-to handbook for aspiring journalists, and distinguished screenwriter and producer Bill Wittliff tells an engrossing tale of a Texas Huck Finn.

  

Below is a preview of our fall books, with videos and other goodies. Browse our full catalog here.

[ Film & Media Studies ]

The Making of Gone With The Wind

By Steve Wilson

More than 600 rarely seen items from the David O. Selznick archive—including on-set photographs, storyboards, correspondence and fan mail, production records, audition footage, restored costumes, and Selznick’s infamous memos—offer fans and film historians alike a must-have behind-the-camera view of the production of this classic movie on its seventy-fifth anniversary.

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The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez

By Frederick Luis Aldama

With insightful analysis of films ranging from El Mariachi to Spy Kids 4 and Machete Kills, as well as a lively interview in which the filmmaker discusses his career, here is the first scholarly overview of the work of Robert Rodriguez, the most successful U.S. Latino filmmaker today.

[ American Studies ]

More info

Being Miss America
Behind the Rhinestone Curtain

By Kate Shindle

Kate Shindle weaves an engrossing memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating, insightful history of the pageant to reveal why confident, ambitious young women still compete in a beauty contest that struggles to remain culturally relevant.

“Kate Shindle’s sharply observed, smart, and heartbreaking take on Miss America will be embraced by pageant super fans and should be required reading for everyone who’s thought about what it takes to be America’s ideal.”

— Jennifer Weiner, author of Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, and All Fall Down

More info

Becoming Belafonte
Black Artist, Public Radical

By Judith Smith

Spotlighting a vibrant episode in the evolution of African American culture and consciousness in America, this book illuminates how multitalented performer Harry Belafonte became a civil rights icon, internationalist, and proponent of black pride and power.

“I thought I knew Harry Belafonte pretty well, but Judith Smith’s book has given me deeper insights into him. A wonderful portrait of Belafonte and his times.”

—Robert DeCormier, musical director for Harry Belafonte, 1957–1961

More info

[ Photography ]

Aaron Siskind
Another Photographic Reality

By Aaron Siskind, Introduction by Gilles Mora

The first true retrospective of a towering figure in American photography and the only book on Aaron Siskind currently in print, this volume features important, rarely published work and an authoritative text by noted photo historian Gilles Mora.

Also forthcoming in photography, Beyond the Forest by Loli Kantor.