Your Last Minute Local Bookstore Shopping List

This time of year can be overwhelming. We're here to help! We've whittled down some of our best-selling books to 13 gift recommendations. We stand by these selections, but if you want to explore more options, we've linked to related titles. Now place your order, check several names off your list at once, and keep your cool! Happy Holidays.


The Salt Lick Cookbook
By Scott Roberts and Jessica Dupuy

No trip to Austin or Central Texas is complete without a visit to the Salt Lick. Both foodies and home chefs alike will enjoy the family recipes and prep techniques from this legendary restaurant.


Barbecue Crossroads: Notes and Recipes from a Southern Odyssey
By Robb Walsh

James Beard Award-winning author Rob Walsh takes us on an extraordinary journey from Texas to the Carolinas and back and to tell the story of Southern BBQ, past, present, and future. Whether a devoted fan of pulled pork or beef brisket, any Southern foodie on your list will enjoy the 70+ finger-licking recipes presented in this engaging book. 

¡Viva Tequila!: Cooking, Cocktails, and Other Agave Adventures
By Lucinda Hutson

America’s premier tequila expert presents a festive blend of lively personal anecdotes, spicy cultural history, and inspired recipes for drinks and dishes – all featuring Mexico’s most notable contribution to the world of distilled spirits. There actually is a whole other world out there beyond lick it, slam it, suck it. 



My Mexico: A Culinary Odyssey with Recipes
By Diana Kennedy

Considered the Julia Child of Mexico and author of the James Beard Award-winning Oaxaca al Gusto (also published by UT Press), Diana Kennedy has the magic touch when it comes to cook books. At 90, she is a master chef with a devoted following around the world. Finally back in print and fully updated, My Mexico is the most personal of Kennedy’s books. 

More in cookbooks »

The Pecan: America’s Native Nut
By James McWilliams

This charming book presents a lively history of the pecan from Southern groves to the Chinese marketplace. Whether you prefer to say “pee-kan” or “pi-khan,” this little nut inspires a sense of nostalgia due to its special place in the American diet and starring role in popular holiday dishes. For fans of the one-food-item-as-cultural-history thing. 

13 Gifts to Charm Every Book Lover

This time of year can be overwhelming. We're here to help! We've whittled down some of our best-selling books to 13 gift recommendations. We stand by these selections, but if you want to explore more options, we've linked to related titles. Now place your order, check several names off your list at once, and keep your cool! Happy Holidays.


The Salt Lick Cookbook
By Scott Roberts and Jessica Dupuy

No trip to Austin or Central Texas is complete without a visit to the Salt Lick. Both foodies and home chefs alike will enjoy the family recipes and prep techniques from this legendary restaurant.


Barbecue Crossroads: Notes and Recipes from a Southern Odyssey
By Robb Walsh

James Beard Award-winning author Rob Walsh takes us on an extraordinary journey from Texas to the Carolinas and back and to tell the story of Southern BBQ, past, present, and future. Whether a devoted fan of pulled pork or beef brisket, any Southern foodie on your list will enjoy the 70+ finger-licking recipes presented in this engaging book. 

¡Viva Tequila!: Cooking, Cocktails, and Other Agave Adventures
By Lucinda Hutson

America’s premier tequila expert presents a festive blend of lively personal anecdotes, spicy cultural history, and inspired recipes for drinks and dishes – all featuring Mexico’s most notable contribution to the world of distilled spirits. There actually is a whole other world out there beyond lick it, slam it, suck it.



My Mexico: A Culinary Odyssey with Recipes
By Diana Kennedy

Considered the Julia Child of Mexico and author of the James Beard Award-winning Oaxaca al Gusto (also published by UT Press), Diana Kennedy has the magic touch when it comes to cook books. At 90, she is a master chef with a devoted following around the world. Finally back in print and fully updated, My Mexico is the most personal of Kennedy’s books. 

More in cookbooks »

The Pecan: America’s Native Nut
By James McWilliams

This charming book presents a lively history of the pecan from Southern groves to the Chinese marketplace. Whether you prefer to say “pee-kan” or “pi-khan,” this little nut inspires a sense of nostalgia due to its special place in the American diet and starring role in popular holiday dishes. For fans of the one-food-item-as-cultural-history thing.

Indie Booksellers Praise Two Prospectors

We’re very excited to have a repeat appearance on an IndieBound Next List. Last October, it was the hardback edition of Jan Reid’s Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards (now a paperback pick for $11.36 on our website). This month, independent booksellers heaped praise on our new book Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, deeming it worthy of hype alongside the latest from Amy Tan, Wally Lamb, and Ann Patchett. Check out some of the rave reviews of Two Prospectors from independent booksellers across the country – and thank you IndieBound!

“Two Prospectors is an amazing read and the closest thing we'll probably get as far as a memoir from Sam Shepard since he's stated that he has no interest in writing one. Comprised of nearly forty years of correspondence and taped conversations between Shepard and his ex-father-in-law, Johnny Dark, the book is intimate and revealing (who knew that Shepard was into Gurdjieff?) not only about Shepard's craft but also his interior life. Perhaps even more surprising is the fascinating figure that Dark becomes as we get to know him through the letters. All in all, this is a one of a kind literary treasure that will probably not be seen in coming decades with the rise of email. Superbly edited by Hammett and beautifully put together by UT Press with lots of pictures and facsimiles of letters, this is my sleeper pick for one of the best books of the year.”
—Cody Morrison, Square Books, Oxford, MS

"This collection is unique in American letters. I don't know of any writer as open about his life and work as Sam Shepard. In addition, Shepard's a voracious reader who loves to discus what he's reading. This book is a tale of two life long friends trying to keep it together, living the writing life."
—Bob Contant, Saint Mark's Bookshop, New York, NY

"I loved Two Prospectors. The candor with which Shepard and Dark discuss art, love, sex, mortality, aging, time and pretty much everything else in life made this an addicting read. It's fascinating to watch the evolution of their relationship over the course of decades. This is a unique correspondence that made me think deeply about my own attitude towards friendship. Whether you're a Shepard fan or not makes no difference. Anyone with a creative bone will find a lot to chew on in their conversations. Ditto for anyone who spends any time thinking about what it is to live a life. I'm grateful they saved these letters". 

—Julie Wernersbach, Publicist at Book People, Austin, TX

Two Prospectors Book Trailer

We're proud to announce that Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark is an IndieBound Next List pick for November. See the full list here>>

Two Prospectors features the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard and long-time friend Johnny Dark. Get a glimpse into the life, philosophy, and creativity of one of America's leading dramatists by watching this book trailer and, of course, picking up the book:

Directed by Jana Birchum
Archival material courtesy of the Sam Shepard Archive, the Wittliff Collections, 
Texas State University

Buy Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

Editor Chad Hammett on Understanding Sam Shepard Through His Letters

Chad Hammett teaches fiction at Texas State University and edited the letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark to create the highly anticipated fall 2013 title: Two Prospectors. Coinciding with the release of the book this week, Chad shares how he poured through years of correspondence to discover these 'two prospectors':

Buy Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

I’m the East Texas son of farmers and honkytonkers and I happen to like to read.  I like to write, too, but reading came first and that is what compelled me to make a life of literature. I found out in college that they called it being an English major for a reason. You experience quite a bit of writing done under the Union Jack. You read Americans, too, like Hawthorne and Melville, but the lives of Puritans and whalers seemed a far cry from my own background. Then I picked up Shepard’s play Fool For Love. When I got to the line in the stage directions that read, “In the dark, Merle Haggard’s tune ‘Wake Up’ from his The Way I Am album is heard,” I took a look around to see if someone was playing a joke on me. I knew that song. My dad had that album. You could start a play with the Hag? I guess you could say Shepard had me at Haggard. 

When I began this editorial project after the sale of Johnny Dark and Sam Shepard’s correspondence to Texas State University’s Wittliff Collections, the name Shepard is what piqued my interest. Of course, by this point, I knew a lot about the man’s career. He was a Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright with more than a dozen Obies on his shelf as well as an Oscar nomination to his name. I’d watched (and re-watched  the climatic peepshow scene of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (written by Shepard) as many times as my VCR let me rewind the frayed rental tape and I could quote from True West at whim: “There aren’t any mountains in the panhandle! It’s flat!”

I’d already committed a year’s worth of work sifting through the Shepard material housed at the Wittliff’s Southwestern Writer’s Collection archive and I’d discovered the way critics delved into the man’s biography in search of clues to illuminate his life and work, and also Shepard’s legendary need for privacy (likely a result of all that biographical digging). So I felt I knew Shepard.

Johnny Dark was a mystery. By this point, I was well aware of the fact that he’d been married to Scarlett, Shepard’s mother-in-law during his fifteen-year marriage to O-Lan Jones Shepard and that Dark had taken the photographs that appeared in Shepard’s Motel Chronicles. And, naturally I knew a mention of Dark opened the Rolling Thunder Logbook, Shepard’s account of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. 

To be honest, my initial search through the entire collection of correspondence turned out to be a hunt for something that wasn’t there. I’d hoped the letters would provide salient and multiple examples of Shepard talking about process and meaning, especially of plays like Buried Child and Lie of the Mind. Granted, there is some of that discussion of the writing and acting life, but my hope was naive, it turns out, so there’s something else I thought I knew. I soon discovered, though, as Shepard himself puts it in his wonderful collection Cruising Paradise, sometimes “the mind shuts down, and then suddenly, something new begins to appear.”

What emerged was more than a glance into the artistic activity of one of our most important twentieth-century writers; the story told by these letters is a tale about male friendship and masculinity, addiction, fidelity, and the changes our society has been through in the last half-century as the era of letter-writing comes to a close. Turns out this Haggard fan didn’t know a thing.

— Chad Hammett will appear at the Texas Book Festival Saturday, October 26th. Click here to add him to your schedule.

Watch the new book trailer for Two Prospectors:

Two Prospectors Book Trailer

We're proud to debut our book trailer for Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, publishing on October 15. Two Prospectors, featuring the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard and long-time friend Johnny Dark, provides an intimate glimpse into the life, philosophy, and creativity of one of America's leading dramatists.

Directed by Jana Birchum
Archival material courtesy of the Sam Shepard Archive, the Wittliff Collections, 
Texas State University

Buy Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

UT Press Book at the Heart of New, Award-Winning Documentary

In this week’s New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott reviews Treva Wurmfeld’s new documentary “Shepard & Dark” under the headline, “Two Writers Bound By Decades of Letters.” The film depicts the decades-long friendship between Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark. As Scott says,“Through it all, they wrote letters full of loose-limbed philosophizing, emotional candor and gruff wit. Those letters, which fill cartons and binders, provide the movie with its premise.” These letters now reside at the Wittliff Collection in San Marcos, Texas (the transference of which is also depicted in the film) and they will be published by UT Press for the first time in Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, available on October 15.

Sam Shepard, Johnny Dark, and their 40-odd years of friendship are fascinating. Their lives are unique case studies in modern masculinity, as both men struggled with loyalty, love, fame, and the nurturance of an independent creative drive. Sam and Johnny began their friendship in Greenwich Village in the 60s and stayed friends through unconventional living arrangements in 1970s San Francisco, Shepard’s rising fame in the 1980s, and the dramatic start to his relationship with actress Jessica Lange. Both the film and the book are deeply personal, and given Shepard’s commitment to privacy, also provide the best opportunity to understand the life behind one of America’s greatest living playwrights.

Film screenings

On October 10, The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX, hosts filmmaker Treva Wurmfeld and Johnny Dark for a screening and panel discussion of “Shepard & Dark.” Read more about the Sam Shepard collection.

The film comes to Austin on October 11, screening at the Violet Crown: http://www.violetcrowncinema.com/movies.php?bit=coming_soon

Watch the trailer of “Shepard & Dark,” released by Music Box Films: