Bobby Joe Gilbert runs from and back to his West Texas small-town world, whose boundaries, along with his own failings, limit his chances of making something of his life

Country Music

C. W. Smith

Literature & Fiction

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Thin men of Haddam

Author's first novel [From front jacket flap] Méndez: a chicano, a ranch foreman thanks to fortunate circumstance, intellectual, and ambitious for himself and his people. Manuelo: his unemployed cousin, desperate, angry, and bent on avenging the wrongs he has suffered. Bond: ranch hand, buffoon, tale-spinner, a former preacher whose congregation now is Méndez. Houston: a Chicagoan who hopes to rebuild his life on the ranch he has just inherited. Four men who dream of the sky but are bound to the earth, who have cast themselves in roles but do not control the script, around whom C. W. Smith has built his remarkable first novel, Thin Men of Haddam. It is a rich and sweeping story, set in the Southwest, impregnated with regional humor and color, and distinguished by a sure sense of characterization and plotting. The novel is constructed of stories told by its characters and flashbacks involving Méndez, the protagonist, who struggles to reconcile his dreams with his hatred for the Anglos who alone can satisfy them, and to satisfy both his self-interest and his desire to be a martyr for his people. Its tension ever building, the novel moves inexorably to its climactic scene, a dead-of-night manhunt ¡n the rugged, semiarid hills of West Texas. Readers of Thin Men of Haddam will find echoes of Faulkner and Cervantes, but Smith is his own man, a writer whose major talents are fully displayed in this big, stemwinding novel of extraordinary authority, wit, and dramatic power.

Thin Men of Haddam

Penguin Adult HC/TR

Small-time entertainers Don and Dottie Baxter discover that their big break, a booking in a second-class Las Vegas lounge, has unexpected consequences as conflicting ambitions and tragedy threaten their love for each other

The Vestal Virgin Room

United States

Atheneum

Nineteen-year-old Jason is lost. The rush of graduation parties has subsided, the ubiquitous discussion of college departures dimmed to a dull roar. His former classmates have made elaborate plans, but the only date on Jason’s calendar is a court appearance next Monday. Jason, who dropped out of high school just two months shy of graduation, finds himself stuck in the well-worn grooves of his hometown. But when his over-achieving girlfriend Lisa departs for UT Austin to study medicine, Jason finds Mesquite a place he can hardly recognize. 
Jason’s family can offer him little direction. After his mother Sue’s unexpected death a few years back, his father Burl, fifteen years sober, slipped into old drinking habits. Jason watched the once clockwork-perfect routine of his family life descend into chaos. When Burl marries Lily, a high-strung, high-powered attorney, she brings a daughter into the house: Emily, eleven years old and a self-described know-it-all whose very existence is enough to irritate Jason. 
Three days before Jason must appear in court, he receives a “Dear John” letter from Lisa. Heartbroken and determined to convince Lisa of his worth, Jason decides to hitchhike to Lisa’s dorm in Austin—but Emily, desperate to return to her father, a UT professor, overhears Jason’s plans and demands to accompany him. When Burl and Lily return home to find their children missing, Lily puts out an Amber Alert for Emily, accusing Jason of abducting her daughter. The frantic search effort that ensues threatens to destroy the tentative household that Burl and Lily have just begun to establish. 
Smith’s gift for creating three-dimensional characters, abundantly demonstrated in his previous TCU Press titles including Understanding Women and Purple Hearts, lends this coming-of-age tale an unexpected quality of honesty and sophisticated narrative rarely seen in contemporary young adult fiction. Mary Powell, author of the TCU Press books Auslander and Galveston Rose, describes Smith’s prose as “rich and sophisticated, yet accessible, and the dialogue is right on.” Steplings doesn’t romanticize the misadventures of its protagonists. Though Jason and Emily grapple with universal teen issues—Emily searches for acceptance in her new middle school, while Jason balks when confronted with new adult responsibilities—their troubles feel like uncharted territory when expressed through pitch-perfect narrative voices. “Watching Jason self-destruct,” according to Powell, “is akin to watching someone in a horror film go down into the basement.” 
The authentic quality of Smith’s prose extends to the Texas setting; readers will recognize their neighbors in the characters that populate Mesquite and Austin. Kate Lehrer observed that Smith also “draws subtle distinctions among social classes.” Smith invokes tension between Jason’s no-frills lifestyle and Lisa’s country-club upbringing, and paints a widening gulf between Burl’s small-town mannerisms and Lily’s cosmopolitan tastes. 
Powell called Steplings “a friendly, hopeful, humorous, and thoughtful book about growing up.” Growing up, however, doesn’t belong exclusively to the young, and Steplings is a story that can’t be shelved neatly in the young adult category. Both teen and adult readers will see themselves in this multifaceted narrative of self-discovery.

Steplings

TCU Press

In the mode of such humorists Bill Bryson and David Sedaris, C.W. Smith's essays in A Throttled Peacock - Observations on the Old World take a droll and ironic look at the antics of Europeans at home and Americans abroad in this off-beat memoir that gently mocks both traveler and host. In an Oxford University lecture hall, a local mayor wearing a flamboyant ceremonial necklace sets off Smith's wry meditation on the English love of tradition; in Geneva he learns that a companion with whom you travel 24/7 can be your best friend and your worst enemy; in an ancient French village he learns that pride can lead to hubris when he and his wife introduce multi-national tourists to Texas chili. With an underlying theme of misperception and the surprise of upended expectations, these essays form a singular vision that entertains even as they slyly instruct. As one reader reports, "One glory lies in experiencing a deepening emotional and intellectual perspective as both narrator and reader discover more about the people and places. This shifting perception keeps the tales dynamic, almost like detective stories that present a mystery that becomes ever more complex before we reach a resolution."

A Throttled Peacock: Observations On the Old World

DeGolyer Library SMU