Kirjahaku

A huge, riveting, deeply imagined novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo in 1836--an event that formed the consciousness of Texas and that resonates through American history--The Gates of the Alamo follows the lives of three people whose fates become bound to the now-fabled Texas fort: Edmund McGowan, a proud and gifted naturalist whose life's work is threatened by the war against Mexico; the resourceful, widowed innkeeper Mary Mott; and her sixteen-year-old son, Terrell, whose first shattering experience with love leads him instead to war, and into the crucible of the Alamo. The story unfolds with vivid immediacy and describes the pivotal battle from the perspective of the Mexican attackers as well as the American defenders. Filled with dramatic scenes, and abounding in fictional and historical personalities--among them James Bowie, David Crockett, William Travis, and General Santa Anna--The Gates of the Alamo enfolds us in history and, through its remarkable and passionate storytelling, allows us to participate at last in an American legend.

In this remarkable collection of essays, Stephen Harrigan explores, with an unfailing depth of feeling, the human longing to feel at home in the world of nature. In vivid and convincing prose, he evokes the landscape of his home territory, Texas, and his own reactions, sometimes droll, sometimes haunted, to the extraordinary power of place that Texas projects.

This evocative account of the months Stephen Harrigan spent diving on the coral reefs off Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992.

A critically acclaimed debut novel first published in 1980, Aransas recounts a young man's attempt to find his place in the world as he navigates the moral dilemma of training an "exquisitely conscious being" to perform in a seaside dolphin circus.

Originally published in 1984, Stephen Harrigan's passionate, emotionally intense second novel takes readers deep into the mysterious passageways of a Central Texas aquifer—and of the human heart. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

2020 Philosophical Society of Texas Nonfiction Book Prize 2019 Nonfiction Book Award Finalist, Writers’ League of Texas 2021 Citation from the San Antonio Conservation Society"Harrigan, surveying thousands of years of history that lead to the banh mi restaurants of Houston and the juke joints of Austin, remembering the forgotten as well as the famous, delivers an exhilarating blend of the base and the ignoble, a very human story indeed. [ Big Wonderful Thing is] as good a state history as has ever been written and a must-read for Texas aficionados.”-Kirkus, Starred ReviewThe story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world.“I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists-all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea.Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes, it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

It is Illinois in the 1830s, and Abraham Lincoln is an ambitious--if charmingly awkward--young circuit lawyer and state legislator. Among his friends and political colleagues are Joshua Speed, William Herndon, Stephen Douglas, and many others who have come to the exploding frontier town of Springfield to find their futures. One of these men is poet Cage Weatherby. Cage both admires and clashes with Lincoln, questioning his cautious stance on slavery. But he stays by Lincoln's side, even as Lincoln slips back and forth between high spirits and soul-hollowing sadness and depression, and even as he recovers from a disastrous courtship to marry the beautiful, capricious, politically savvy Mary Todd. Mary will bring stability to Lincoln's life, but she will also trigger a conflict that sends the two men on very different paths into the future.

A New York Times bestselling novel, modern historical classic, and winner of the TCU Texas Book Award, The Spur Award and the Wrangler Award for Outstanding Western NovelIt's 1836, and the Mexican province of Texas is in revolt. As General Santa Anna's forces move closer to the small fort that will soon be legend, three people's fates will become intrinsically tied to the coming battle: Edmund McGowan, a proud and gifted naturalist; the widowed innkeeper Mary Mott; and her sixteen-year-old son, Terrell, whose first shattering experience with love has led him into the line of fire. Filled with dramatic scenes, and abounding in fictional and historical personalities--among them James Bowie, David Crockett, William Travis, and Stephen Austin--The Gates of the Alamo is a faithful and compelling look at a riveting chapter in American history.

The fragile, 1952 postwar tranquility of a young boy's world explodes one summer day when a leopard escapes from the Oklahoma City zoo, throwing all the local residents into dangerous excitement, in this evocative story of a child's confrontation with his deepest fears For Grady McClarty, an ever-watchful but bewildered five-year-old boy, World War II is only a troubling, ungraspable event that occurred before he was born. But he feels its effects all around him. He and his older brother Danny are fatherless, and their mother, Bethie, is still grieving for her fighter-pilot husband. Most of all, Grady senses it in his two uncles: young combat veterans determined to step into a fatherhood role for their nephews, even as they struggle with the psychological scars they carry from the war. When news breaks that a leopard has escaped from the Oklahoma City Zoo, the playthings and imagined fears of Grady's childhood begin to give way to real-world terrors, most imminently the dangerous jungle cat itself. The Leopard Is Loose is a stunning encapsulation of America in the 1950s, and a moving portrait of a boy's struggle to find his place in the world.

Part memoir, part mystery: a powerful exploration of the three secrets of Fatima and a man's journey grappling with his own faith In 1917, in Fatima, Portugal, three shepherd children claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared before them and spoke the words, "Do not be afraid." Stephen Harrigan first heard the story of Our Lady of Fatima when he was a young boy attending a Catholic school in Texas in the 1950s, struggling to come to grips with a religion that simultaneously soothed and terrified him. The question of what actually happened in Fatima in the early part of the twentieth century, one of the most important, and most mysterious, events in the church's history, captured his young imagination and has stayed with him ever since. Sorrowful Mysteries is a detailed and extraordinarily compassionate examination of the phenomenon of Our Lady of Fatima, an attempt to unravel and put into perspective the lives of the three children, how this life-altering event changed them and the world they knew, and how it intersected with so many of the signal moments of the twentieth century--pandemics, revolutions, world wars, assassinations, and even skyjackings. It is a sweeping story, but also at its heart a very personal one, about Harrigan's own relationship with Catholicism and his lifelong struggle to break free from a religion that in so many paradoxical ways shaped and defined him.

In the fall of 2019, the University of Texas Press published the inaugural volume of the Texas Bookshelf, a major new history of Texas by Stephen Harrigan, the New York Times best-selling author. The Texas Bookshelf promises to be the most ambitious and comprehensive publishing endeavor about the culture and history of one state ever undertaken. Comprised of in-depth general-interest histories of a range of Texas subjects—politics, music, film, business, architecture, and sports, among many others—the Bookshelf volumes will be written by the state’s brightest authors, scholars, and intellectuals, all affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin.Published in a signed edition, They Came from the Sky offers an exciting preview of Harrigan’s sweeping, full-length history. This tantalizing “short” begins with the earliest native inhabitants over ten thousand years ago and continues through the ill-fated Spanish explorations of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In its pages, we encounter the prehistoric flint producers and traders who were Texas’s first entrepreneurs; Spanish castaways and would-be conquerors; the Karankawas, Querechos (Apaches), and Caddos, whose lifeways were forever changed by contact with Europeans; and the “Lady in Blue,” an abbess who mysteriously claimed to have visited the “Quivira and the Jumanas” in Texas while remaining within her Spanish cloister.Bringing Stephen Harrigan’s formidable narrative talent to the founding story of Texas, They Came from the Sky constitutes the vanguard of a major publishing event.

A new collection of essays grappling with identity and memory, from a master of the form. The author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Gates of the Alamo, the sweeping Texas history Big Wonderful Thing, and decades of incisive journalism, Stephen Harrigan is an adept writer skilled in crafting memorable characters. From this singular voice now comes a collection of essays tackling the most personal, and yet most expansive, themes of all: identity, memory, and time itself. An Anchor in the Sea of Time unfolds individual stories but also a larger narrative about the development and distortions of history. In one essay, a painting on his grandparents’ wall is seared in Harrigan’s young mind. In another, a group trip to Vietnam stirs up a sobering confrontation with class privilege among Americans who fought there and others, like Harrigan, who did their best not to. The award-winning essay “Off Course” reflects on the father Harrigan never met. And Harrigan’s reporting about the Karankawas, an Indigenous group from the Texas coast once thought to be extinct, takes readers deep into the recesses of collective forgetting and offers glimpses of the possibility of recovery. A vivid encounter with lost selves, vanished worlds, and futures yet unrealized, An Anchor in the Sea of Time is perhaps the most personal book yet from this beloved writer.

Winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best American Historical Fiction Francis "Gil" Gilheaney is a sculptor of boundless ambition, but bad fortune and pride have driven him and his long-suffering daughter Maureen into artistic exile in Texas just after World War I. When an aging rancher commissions Gil to create a memorial statue of his son who was killed in action, Gil believes it will be his greatest achievement. But as work proceeds on the statue, Gil and Maureen come to realize that their new client is a far more complicated man than they ever expected, and that he is guarding a secret that haunts his relationship with his son even in death.