The visual most people have of a comic book is of a brightly colored superhero flying over the city, fist-fighting an equally brightly colored supervillain. A fan of the medium is already aware of the amount of personal, story-driven works present in modern comics, but a large part of the…
The owner of Oak Cliff bookstore The Wild Detectives became aware of literary gender inequality and wanted to do something about it. He approached Lauren Smart, who was then the arts editor for the Dallas Observer and now works as a professor at Southern Methodist University, to program an entire month…
It’s a fairly simple concept. On Friday night, five women will strip down, get onstage and crack open some books. It’s a game plan that Naked Girls Reading has played out across since its first event in 2010. It’s not an act of tantalization, at least not in the way…
For nearly seven decades, the house at 314 W. Eighth St. in Oak Cliff was merely a domicile. Nothing more than a place to keep your stuff dry when it rains and plug in your refrigerator. That was before Javier García del Moral and Paco Vique owned it. Four years…
Although they came from diverse backgrounds, a common thread links the women in Mary Dodson Wade’s latest book, Amazing Texas Girls. “I wanted to call this book Gumption,” Wade says, “because I see that.” Amazing Texas Girls, released Sunday by publisher Lone Star Books, trails the lives of 15 women,…
Tyra Banks was up at 4 a.m. the day after Easter to appear on the Today show with her mother. They were promoting their new book, Perfect is Boring: 10 Things My Crazy, Fierce Mama Taught Me About Beauty, Booty and Being a Boss. But Banks’ mom, Carolyn London isn’t…
Writing a memoir about your family that holds nothing back sounds like a perfect way to make every Thanksgiving awkward for the rest of your life. But Dianna de la Garza, the mother Demi Lovato, says the pop singer, as well as her other daughters, Dallas Lovato and Madison de…
It all began with the idea to sell organic 1-pound pumpkins. Although Free Range Pumpkins, Arlington’s newest geek culture warehouse, never sold pumpkins, owners Herb and Amy Kaplan sold lots of other stuff through Amazon. Now they’ve opened their first brick-and-mortar store. A decade ago, it might have been the…
The inspiration for a new children’s book geared toward Dallasites, Goodnight Lakewood, arrived at bedtime. “One night, we were reading books before bedtime with our older son, Mack, who was 3 at the time,” author and Lakewood resident Jaclyn Amend says. “One of his favorite books was a ‘goodnight’ book…
This list, arranged in no particular order, is limited to books that were published in 2017 and written by authors who live in Dallas-Fort Worth. The Sandcastle Empire by Kayla Olson This dystopian thriller, published in June, focuses on a formerly privileged girl named Eden who escapes a labor camp…
First, he was a child prodigy who talked at 7 months. Later, he did enough cocaine to kill a baby rhinoceros. In a new authorized biography titled Everything’s Bigger in Texas: The Life and Times of Kinky Friedman, author Mary Lou Sullivan digs into the Texas Jewboy. And it turns…
They spent long periods of time tapping away at a keyboard in isolation and were ballsy enough to tell someone, perhaps a less-than-flattering editor somewhere, only to receive a rejection slip in return. Now, they have an audience. The literary series Rejected: Stories Unsold debuted at Wild Detectives bookstore last…
The pages of Abandon Me, a collection of essays by Melissa Febos, are filled with extraordinary and honest details of the author’s traumatic past. Febos, who will read from and discuss her work at The Wild Detectives on Thursday, takes us on her journey to find her birth father and…
The early days of comic books featured some ethnically diverse and multidimensional characters, but they were few and far between. Most nonwhite characters reinforced stereotypes and served as C- and D-tier backup to blond-haired, blue-eyed superheroes. “Growing up with superheroes like the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Spider-Man, Batman and Superman,…
Bobby Goldstein has been in Dallas since he attended college at Southern Methodist University. Afterward, he went to Waco to earn a law degree from Baylor. Still not positive what he wanted to do when he grew up, he had a vision for Cheaters, a Dallas-based show about catching, well,…
Hector Rodriguez says he finally heard his calling to become a superhero comic artist and publish a superhero story that he created in college when a student came to him in tears. His father, the student said, had been deported. “He’s crying and that kind of hit me,” Rodriguez says. “What…
What are we even doing with our lives? That’s the question Dallas native Mary Dauterman and her co-author, BuzzFeed Animals editor Chelsea Marshall, pose in their new satirical children’s book of the same name. In the book — released by Harper Collins on Aug. 8 — the characters live in…
Joe Tone announced just over two years ago that he was leaving his position as Dallas Observer’s editor-in-chief to write a book about the drug war and horse racing. That book, Bones: Brothers, Horses, Cartels and the Borderland Dream, was released this month by One World, an imprint of Random House…
The titular child of S. Craig Zahler’s Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric of an Anomalous Child is a boldly conceived, cinematic protagonist. The boy, whose mother died giving birth to him and whose father is unknown, has pink skin with white patches. The inside of his mouth is purple and fanged. White…
As Doug Curtis, CEO of AT&T Performing Arts Center, took the stage Friday night, he joked about the pressure of introducing an artist with such a devoted following. The Neil Gaiman fans were out in force at the sold-out Winspear Opera House, and for the two-hour performance, one of four…
Chuck Klosterman speaks at the Dallas Museum of Art 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 20 Nostalgia is a controversial topic in artistic circles. Critics hate it (it’s uncritical and lazy), but audiences love it (it’s fun and escapist). Culture critic Chuck Klosterman traffics heavily in nostalgia, with essays and novels written…
The former mayor of Colleyville is now a sexpert. Well, kind of. In 2007, after several years of marriage, Donna Arp Weitzman and her husband divorced. No longer the mayor of Colleyville and looking to start over, Weitzman moved to a high-rise in Dallas and began dating. She was 55…
