Five top books about Texas

Rick Bass’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. His memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His new novel is All the Land to Hold Us.

One of Bass's five favorite books about Texas, as told to The Daily Beast:

The Border Trilogy
by Cormac McCarthy

(All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain.) Technically the setting is in New Mexico and Mexico, not Texas, but it’s close enough. The people and animals that pass back and forth through those (once upon a time) porous borders cared nothing for whether it was Texas or New Mexico, nor, for that matter, Mexico or the United States. As with few other writers, landscape and culture are natural characters, and major ones, in these novels.

Read about the other books on the list.

All the Pretty Horses is on Simon Akin's list of the ten most attractive women in literature and Meg Rosoff's top 10 list of adult books for teenagers.

The Crossing is one of Rose Tremain’s five best novels about arduous journeys.

Also see Attica Locke's five books on Texas, and The Great Texas Novel, part 1 and The Great Texas Novel, part 2.

--Marshal Zeringue