Where cotton and conscience collide, one good man bets his soul on the people the world tries to forget.
In 1951 West Texas, aging cotton grower William Allen Littlejohn watches as mechanization ends a way of life — and the lagunero migrant families who pick for him arrive for what both sides know will be their last season. Can one man’s quiet defiance of racism and exploitation can redeem a legacy rooted in slavery and empire?
Moodshine: A Caregiver’s Journey is a raw, deeply human memoir about loving someone through serious mental illness and learning how to keep going. Liz Colvin shares the realities of caregiving, from stigma and relapse to boundaries, faith, and hard-won hope.
Dispatches from Berlin: Wall and Secrets is a historical thriller by Carol J. Williams, the second novel in the Iron Curtain Chronicles. On the night the Berlin Wall opens in November 1989, veteran foreign correspondent Natalie Chester expects the story of a lifetime. Instead her editor pairs her with a gifted but guarded American photographer; and when a name in an East German guidebook turns the assignment personal, neither are prepared for what happens next.
As mass deportations and escalating “border security” budgets dominate the headlines, Reconstructing Immigration: How to Rebuild America’s Economic Advantage, shows why America cannot remain a global economic leader without a modern, lawful way to attract, legalize, and retain the workers it clearly needs. It connects the dots between immigration reform, productivity, entrepreneurship, and regional development, giving readers a coherent plan for how the United States can turn a chronic political crisis into a durable competitive advantage. Drawing on construction, agriculture, healthcare, and technology, Steffy makes the case that an enforcement-first system has disadvantaged legitimate workers and honest employers while rewarding the people who exploit it.
From Tehran to the Permian is Scott Sheffield’s memoir on leading the Permian Basin shale revolution that made America the world’s top oil producer as founder and CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources — and on the FTC’s 2024 collusion accusations that barred him from ExxonMobil’s board after its $59.5 billion acquisition.
Evil rides the borderlands—and it knows your name.
Haunted by a witch only he can see, a traumatized Comanche-Mexican border agent joins an elderly rancher who shelters trafficked girls face cartel brutality, generational trauma, and spiritual warfare in the violent, unforgiving borderlands of West Texas.When girls start disappearing and turning up marked by Palo Mayombe ritual, the locals have a name for the supernatural creature they believe is doing it — The Witch of Sonora. In this borderlands thriller by Johnnie Bernhard, Nocona Ketemoczy, a Marine turned border agent, must stop the kidnappings while facing down the legend of an old woman with cataract eyes who has been in Nocona’s nightmares since childhood.
A Hard Left is a science fiction techno-thriller by Paul McGrath, Book Three of the Terran Incognita series. A Russian troll farm and a Texas tech billionaire are about to loose a “data vacuum” on the world’s banks. The only ones positioned to stop it are two Xylodonian Guardians living quietly as a Mississippi couple.
Deluge Before Dawn is Thomas R. Fox’s firsthand account of the flood that tore through Kerr County, Texas, on July 4, 2025, when the Guadalupe River rose in the dark. Fox, a Kerrville resident, gathered testimony from survivors, families, and responders — the overnight evacuation at Camp Mystic, the searches that followed, and the rebuilding.
An artist-farmer defends his North Texas homestead with a paintbrush, a shovel, and stubborn love. In this sequel to The Art of Farming, Sam Bartlett tends thirty acres of land, paints by night, teaches, gardens, raises animals, and faces the pressures of family change and suburban development. Told in a warm, wry voice, the novel celebrates stewardship, creativity, and community as acts of resistance.
Of Granddaughters and Mars is a poetry collection by Donald Mace Williams, written in traditional forms alongside riddles, monologues, and translations. The poems move between family tenderness and political anger — sequences on bugs and birds, a long poem reimagining the explorer Zebulon Pike, and closing translations from the German Romantics.
Play Like He Would is a true story by Heath Hamrick about the Bremond Tigers, a Texas high school football team that lost sixteen-year-old Jason Yancy to an undiagnosed heart condition during a game in October 1999. Hamrick, the coach’s son, was in the stadium that night, and built the book from interviews conducted in the weeks afterward. After Yancy’s death, his teammates faced an impossible question: How do you continue after losing your heart? This true story follows the Bremond Tigers as they honor their fallen friend’s memory with a simple motto: “Play Like He Would.”
Five Thousand Years of Controversies is Arthur Garson, Jr.’s history of humanity’s great arguments, staged as fifty family dinners across five millennia. The same family appears at every table — a mother, a twelve-year-old daughter after the big picture, a fifteen-year-old son asking the hard questions — and two brothers debate the era’s controversy after the plates are cleared.
Austin Sunrise closes Phil Oakley’s Oakleys trilogy. Brothers Brooks and Ray Oakley take opposite roads out of the family — one through the frozen ground of the war, the other through Austin cafes, the oil fields, and the postwar restaurant boom. It follows Little Hatchet and Runners.
Based on the author’s experiences, this meticulously researched thriller captures forbidden love against perestroika’s historic upheaval—where idealism faces deadly consequences. American correspondent Natalie Chester arrives in Moscow in 1986 and soon falls for Soviet diplomat Anatoly Kuznetsov. Together, they navigate Chernobyl’s aftermath, KGB surveillance, and the collapsing Cold War. Dispatches from Moscow: Spies and Lies by Carol J. Williams, Book One in the Iron Curtain Chronicles is a tale of professional ambition and personal sacrifice, of idealism tested by reality, and of a love that burns brightest in the shadow of the Iron Curtain’s final days.meticulously researched thriller.
Outcry Witness: A Former Prosecutor’s Guide to Healing and Justice After Sexual Violence is JoDee Neil’s account of surviving sexual assault, written from the perspective of an attorney and former prosecutor who spent her career in the courtroom on the other side of cases like her own. It is part memoir and part practical guide to what disclosure actually does — for the person disclosing, and for a justice system that handles it badly.
A young woman on the run. A life built in the shadows. A story that refuses to be forgotten. At fifteen, Frankie ran from an abusive home with nothing but her wits and a gambler’s promise of escape. What she found was a world of speakeasies, bootlegging, and survival on the edge of the law. Now, decades later, her story is ready to be told—one of grit, defiance, and a woman who refused to be broken. Far From Uncertain is a historical novel by Teddy Jones.
In Left is Right, Book Two of Paul McGrath’s Terran Incognita series, Anton and Ellie, two former Centurion Guardians from the planet Xylodon, are working the seamier side of America while Ellie teaches third grade in Mississippi and tries to make sense of Earth’s cruelty.
Now fugitives on two worlds, the Xylodonians find themselves drawn into the orbit of nationalist militias and human trafficking as the mission becomes deeply personal. This second genre-blending installment in the Terran Icognita series fuses satire, sci-fi, and social commentary into a wildly original tale of identity, rebellion, and connection.
Rickwood: How America’s Oldest Ballpark Forged Baseball’s Legends is Tim Whitt and Joe Mock’s history of Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama — the oldest professional ballpark in the country. It runs from Rick Woodward, who built it in 1910, through the players who came through it: Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, Dizzy Dean, Reggie Jackson.
A brutal winter storm pushes Texas to the brink in Dark Texas, a gripping near-future thriller about power loss, resilience, and survival. Through the stories of four ordinary Texans, Charles Petrie, Jr. explores what happens when modern systems fail and community becomes the last line of defense. Inspired by real events, this is a tense, timely novel for readers drawn to disaster fiction with heart and realism
Someday Is Our Horizon is Margie Seaman’s sequel to Someday Belongs to Us. Kate Caldwell’s late-life writing career has taken off after an Oprah interview and she is in love with an astronomer. Then Edward Peregrine — the sea captain she believed she had invented — turns up in her living room, and turns out to have been real.
A compelling historical biography that offers an in-depth look at one of Texas’ most influential and controversial figures during the tumultuous mid-19th century. In The Old Alcalde, John Adams, Jr. offers a balanced and nuanced portrayal of a controversial figure — Oran Milo Roberts — Texas jurist, secessionist, and governor, and one of the most consequential figures of the state’s nineteenth century. Adams follows him from an Alabama boyhood to the bench, through the convention that took Texas out of the Union, and into the governor’s office.
A gripping tale of small-town intrigue and corruption
In this crime thriller from Conor McAnally, Mike Carson, a disgraced New York journalist, returns to his Texas hometown to sell his late uncle’s house. Asked to look into a suspicious death while he is there, he finds self-dealing and drug trafficking running straight up through local government and law enforcement. What should be a simple task quickly spirals out of control, and with each revelation, Carson finds himself dragged deeper into a powerful conspiracy.
Fast-paced, with a colorful cast of characters and razor-sharp dialogue, Bullets in the Water is a must-read for fans of crime fiction and investigative thrillers.
David Dale’s memoir of a military flying career, Aviation Therapy chronicles Dale’s personal transformation through flight—from B-52 nuclear alert missions during the Cold War to wartime refueling in Desert Storm and Bosnia, then flying General Tommy Franks after 9/11. Dale went from a quiet navigator to commanding the elite squadron responsible for carrying the nation’s top military leaders. This inspiring memoir reveals how aviation shaped one man’s journey from quiet navigator to commanding an elite squadron.
Llano Estacado is a historical Western novel by Max L. Knight set in 1870s Texas. A Comanche war leader and a Texas homesteader each lose their families to a massacre — and each spends a year hunting the other’s people. A story of the frontier cycle of vengeance, in the tradition of The Searchers.
2026 Spur Award-Winning Finalist for Best Western Contemporary novel.
Everyone knows who killed Maggie Schneider. But why? Inspired by true events, novelist Cynthia Leal Massey weaves an intricate tale that spans the decades from the Great Depression to the crippling drought of the fifties. The 1958 murder of champion turkey breeder Maggie Schneider in south central Texas is not a whodunnit. The mystery here is more profound: Why did he do it?
Timberline, U.S.A. is Donald Mace Williams’s account of the country above the last stunted pine, from California’s Sierra Nevada to New Hampshire’s White Mountains. A career journalist, Williams reports on the high places themselves and on the people who go up into them, asking what keeps drawing Americans into thin air and hard weather.
Why We Struggle to Go Green is Thomas Manuel Ortiz’s assessment of the clean energy transition, written by a mechanical engineer with thirty years across conventional and renewable energy. His argument is that no technological fix solves human-induced climate change on its own, and that a credible path requires giving up the hope of building our way out. The rhetoric and politics around climate change obscures a troubling truth: Clean energy technologies alone cannot solve the problem of human-induced climate change.
Why We Struggle to Go Green offers a clear-eyed assessment of our efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change from a mechanical engineer who’s spent 30 years looking for solutions.
Winner of the 2025 Sarton Award in historical fiction
A Family of Good Women by Teddy Jones is a historical mystery set in Borger, Texas, during the oil boom. When Imogene Good, still grieving her mother’s death, leaves behind a promising teaching career to open a boarding house in a rough, near-lawless town, she faces danger, loneliness, and a question that cuts to the heart of the story: what does family really mean?
Little Sky Bear and the Dragon is the second book in Amy Jackson and Donna Paredes’s Night Sky series, a picture book that tells a story of friendship through four constellations. Jackson founded Starry Sky Austin, an astronomy education program, and works on the books with her daughter.
Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader is a selection translated by Donald Mace Williams, with the German and English printed on facing pages. Williams keeps Rilke’s meter rather than flattening it into free verse. His translation of “The Girl Grown Up” won the 2024 Der Hovanessian Translation Prize from the New England Poetry Club.
The Bugbear Hunter follows David Crockett through his years in Congress, between the frontier reputation that got him elected and the Washington he had to survive. Around him are Dr. William A. Caruthers, Ivy Green, and R.C. Crabtree, and behind them the Jackson presidency, the National Bank fight, and the widening gap between wealthy elites and struggling pioneers.
No Saints Here is written by Aaron Fette and his mother Claudette, in alternating voices. Aaron lived with mental illness from childhood, moved through addiction, violence, and the justice system, and died of an opioid overdose in a Fort Worth homeless encampment on April 2, 2017. Claudette, a therapist and scholar, finished the book.
Voices of Camptown unlocks the stories lying beneath an overgrown cemetery in Washington County, Texas, and reconstructs the lives buried there — the churches, schools, and businesses African Americans built after Emancipation, under Reconstruction and then Jim Crow. The authors, Charles Swenson, Tina B. Henderson, and Robert R. Bubb, present more than a local history. Voices of Camptown is a celebration of community, resilience, and the enduring power of remembrance. It revealsthe overlooked story of the “Birthplace of Texas Independence”— where half the population received their independence only following the Civil War.
In this historical novel by Paul Remmers, set in Galveston during the Great Storm of 1900, Dr. Douglas Schuler is fresh from medical school and interning in the thriving coastal city of Galveston, Texas. It’s a year of great progress in medicine, but his skills will be tested as the Great Storm approaches. Can he survive, win the girl of his dreams, and become the doctor he hopes to be?
A tribute to bar bands, musical dreamers, and offbeat ambition….
The Rise of the Mad March follows four mismatched musicians — Christine on lead, Henry on rhythm, Gretchen on bass, Melissa on drums — through the year they became a band and the month they toured. It’s a tribute to the greatest band that never was — a novel about the bands that never headlined, never got signed, and never had an answer when someone asked why they weren’t famous.
Under the Gulf Coast Sun is a coming-of-age novel by Skip Rhudy set against the sun-soaked beaches of Port Aransas, Texas, in 1978. Kassie Hernandez is aiming for a career in the space program and is not looking for anything else. Then she meets a surfer named Connor O’Reilly at one of the island’s Pod House parties, and the summer stops going the way she planned. A coming-of-age tale set against the sun-soaked beaches of 1970s Port Aransas, Rhudy weaves a love letter to the people and culture of the Texas coast.
Runners is Book Two of Phil Oakley’s Oakleys series. Walter and Ada Oakley have made themselves model citizens of Telegraph, Texas, and are watching their children come apart — rum running, train-hopping, one child dead and another on the wrong side of the law — as Prohibition gives way to the Depression and then the war.
An award-winning sci-fi satire of alien espionage, southern charm and chaos on Earth! With Left, Book One in the Terran Icognita series, debut novelist Paul McGrath delivers a sharp, witty, and wildly entertaining sci-fi satire that asks: What if an alien held up a mirror to America—and we didn’t like what we saw? Anton-7 was sent to observe Earth, not to live on it. Stranded in Hernando, Mississippi after missing his ride home to Xylodon, he breaks the first rule of alien espionage — never interfere — and interferes.
Espionage, Survival, and the Fight for Texas Independence
From the author of the French Letters trilogy comes a sweeping historical adventure full of unforgettable Texas legends. Laced with exuberant, historical figures such as Sam Houston, Mirabeau Lamar, and Jack Hays, Dangerous Latitudes is a quest across a war-torn frontier that becomes a race to save two hundred captured Texans who the Mexican army has marked for death.
Rediscover the Magic of the Night Sky with Cassandra and the Night Sky
Brought to life by the mother-daughter duo Amy Jackson (Starry Sky Austin founder) and Donna Paredes, this beautifully re-released classic from Stoney Creek Publishing is a must-have for young dreamers, stargazers, and lovers of magical adventures.
The Best General in the Civil War is Conrad Bibens’s autobiographical novel in the voice of George Thomas — the Virginia-born Union general his family disowned and the South despised. Thomas earned the names Rock of Chickamauga and Sledge of Nashville, and was never fully trusted by Lincoln or Grant because of where he was born.
Richard Coke: Texan is a biography by Rosser Coke Newton, Sr., an indirect descendant of its subject. As governor, Coke brought Texas out of Reconstruction — a young Virginia lawyer who settled in Waco, served in the Civil War, and took office only after his predecessor occupied the Capitol with armed men rather than leave it.
The Barber, the Astronaut, & the Golf Ball is Barbara Radnofsky and Ed Supkis’s account of the friendship between Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard and his barber, Carlos Villagomez. Shepard gave Villagomez an autographed golf ball after the mission. Whether that particular ball had been to the moon is the question the book chases.
T. D. Motley’s novel The Art of Farming celebrates a symbiosis of plants, humans, dogs and livestock, with wildlife cousins on the fringes. Retired art teacher, Sam Bartlett, works thirty acres outside the town of Elysia. Texas. Aided by his lovely “sidekick,” Annie, and a handful of local after-school teens, Sam markets herbs and produce, and face off with his most formidable antagonist, a miniature donkey named Sol who schemes daily to outwit him.
Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom is Donald Mace Williams’s translation of the oldest narrative poem in English, made to be read aloud rather than studied. He keeps the Anglo-Saxon kennings — the sea stays “whale paths” — works in four-stress iambic meter, and holds the scholarly apparatus down to eight endnotes.
The Mushroom Girl is Dagmar Grieder’s memoir of childhood in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Her father was conscripted and has not been heard from in months; her mother takes her and her younger brother west ahead of the advancing Russian Army. Food is scarce, so she learns the forests, and becomes expert at finding the best mushrooms.
The Real World of Texas Politics argues that the state runs two political systems — one for the privileged and one for everyone else. Its authors are a political scientist, a union leader, and a former state representative, and they hold leaders in both parties responsible. The analysis builds on the work of political scientist James Lamare.
Little Hatchet is the first installment in Phil Oakley’s Oakleys series, a family saga loosely based on his own kin. After the Civil War, James Oakley moves his family to Little Hatchet Creek in New Mexico. When his youngest son is taken from the front porch, twelve-year-old Walter Oakley goes after him — and the story runs from there into Prohibition-era Texas.
Bound in Silence is Christena Stephens’s investigation of an unsolved 1943 double murder in Littlefield, Texas. Dr. Roy Hunt and his wife Mae were found bound, beaten, and shot. The only witness was their five-year-old daughter, who did not speak about that night for seventy years — until Stephens persuaded her to.
The Nectar Dancer collects sixty-one short poems by Donald Mace Williams, most of them under a page. He spent his working life as a newspaper writer and editor, and the poems carry the compression reporters aim for — observations of life, loss, and the natural world, written in meter and rhyme.
Second Lives is a memoir by neurologist Ralph B. Lilly, who was struck by a drunk driver while riding his motorcycle in 1980 and sustained a severe brain injury. He returned to practice as a behavioral neurologist treating the condition he now had. He died in 2021; Diane F. Kramer and Joyce Stamp Lilly finished the book.
Wolfe and Being Ninety pairs two works by Donald Mace Williams. “Wolfe” retells Beowulf in late-nineteenth-century Texas, where Billy Wolfe hunts a creature that has killed livestock and a laborer on a remote ranch. “Being Ninety” is Williams’s memoir of nine decades — a Depression childhood, and a life as poet, journalist, professor, and trained singer.
Ghostly Bugles: A Novel of the Alamo by Max L. Knight — the first docent ever appointed at the Alamo — tells the 1836 siege from Texian, Tejano, and Mexican perspectives at once, through a dying man in present-day San Antonio to whom the battle’s dead, named and nameless, have begun to speak.
Grinders: Baseball’s Intrepid Infantry is a collection of baseball life stories by broadcaster Mike Capps and former major league pitcher Chuck Hartenstein It profiles more than forty journeymen, roster fillers and cup-of-coffee callups — the players without superstar talent who fill out every roster at every level, and whose careers ran on will instead. It’s a tribute to the game’s unheralded foot soldiers who took the hard knocks road, bouncing between the Show and obscurity, never quite achieving their dreams, all for a chance to play the game they love.
Someday Belongs to Us is a romance by Margie Seaman. Kate Caldwell is seventy-two, has written more than thirty novels, and cannot start the thirty-first. Her publisher wants more explicit scenes; she thinks love is more than that. She books a Panama Canal cruise with her granddaughter to break the block, and does not find the quiet she planned on.
Silver Winner — Best New Fiction, IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards
The Big Empty is a novel by Loren C. Steffy and a silver winner for Best New Fiction in IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards. A ranch manager and a semiconductor executive collide on a West Texas highway, and then keep colliding over the future of Conquistador — a dying town one of them intends to save by building a chip plant in it.
Deconstructed: An Insider’s View of Illegal Immigration and the Building Trades is Loren C. Steffy and Stan Marek’s best-selling account of illegal immigration inside the American construction industry. Marek runs one of the largest specialty subcontracting firms in the country and has watched, over forty years, construction work go from a middle-class career to something that traps undocumented workers without overtime or healthcare.
Silver Winner — Best New Nonfiction, IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards
The Last Trial of T. Boone Pickens is Chrysta Castañeda and Loren C. Steffy’s account of the legendary oilman’s final courtroom fight. . Cut out of a Permian Basin deal, Pickens hired Castañeda to sue. In this inside record of the billion-dollar trial that followed, Castañeda and Pickens take on powerful oil industry adversaries, offering an intimate portrait of a business icon’s final fight and the determination required to win.
The first definitive biography of George Mitchell, “the father of fracking,” who perfected drilling techniques that transformed America from being oil-dependent to a major producer. Yet he also created The Woodlands, pioneering sustainable community development. Steffy examines the “Mitchell Paradox”—his conflicting legacy in energy innovation and environmental protection.
The Man Who Thought Like a Ship is Loren C. Steffy’s biography of his father, J. Richard Steffy — a small-town Pennsylvania electrician with no advanced degrees who taught himself to reconstruct ancient ships from their fragments, and became the world’s leading authority on how they were built.
