Texas has grown a bumper crop of book authors and, with that, an ever-expanding list of literary festivals. San Antonio’s sprawls around its towering tomato-red public library every spring. Lubbock daringly throws its in sweaty August, while Boerne awaits the arrival of typically more bearable October weather. Then there’s the biggest of them all: the Texas Book Festival, which will gather some 250 authors in early November and erect a bibliophilic tent city out front of the state Capitol, perhaps ironically the launching pad of myriad political attacks on supposedly intolerable tomes and sinful librarians.
This year’s Austin fest includes a suite of authors whose work the Texas Observer has covered: Steve Harrigan, with Sorrowful Mysteries, his haunting “sideways memoir” meditation on Portuguese child mystics;Jim Harrington, who recently penned his account of building the Texas Civil Rights Project; and my own true Texas horror story, The Scientist and the Serial Killer.
The festival lineup adds plenty more to Texans’ 2025 must-read lists. Here are three featured nonfiction tales by Texas authors filled with intrigue, espionage, and previously untold backstories.
