Books
The Road to Roma
Dave Kuhne's The Road to Roma and Other Stories takes you into the gritty, often poignant worlds of a Fort Worth car wash owner, a pair of college students hitching their way to Mexico, and a young man who lets his misplaced love and ambition pull him into the drug culture of post-Vietnam-era Austin. These award-winning stories showcase the talent and wit of a consummate Texas writer whose fiction reflects an intimate sense of character and place.
descant: Fifty Years
Robert Penn Warren, Karl Shapiro, Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Bukowski, and Denise Levertov are but a few of the outstanding authors whose works grace this celebration of fifty years of descant, the literary journal of Texas Christian University. This retrospective traces the journal's history from its beginnings as the product of a literary discussion group modeled after the Vanderbilt Fugitives to its recent years as a critically acclaimed small magazine that receives thousands of submissions and offers annual awards for fiction and poetry.
African Settings in Contemporary American Novels
Africa has long captured the Western imagination as a land shrouded in danger and mystery. British and American novels written before World War II established popular conventions and stereotypes about Africa that have been increasingly challenged by contemporary American novels set in Africa. Kuhne's book overviews the ways in which Africa has been employed as a powerful setting for American novels written since World War II. Kuhne argues that contemporary American novels with African settings are largely didactic, that these novels convey specific lessons about Africa and Africans, and that they compare African and American cultures in order to evaluate and critique the two worlds.
