Carl Craven offers adventures that span the twentieth century and range from the javelina hardscrabble of Texas to the Carribean coast and river jungles of Venezuela. It is an unusual memoir full of surprising stories and charming essays about extraordinary people you will enjoy meeting. Once you start this book, you will not want to put it down.

Adventures from the Last Century

Biographies & Memoirs

Craven, Carl

Historical

Angelina River Press

In 1952, in a botched attempt to hitch a ride to a nearby village, Rosita and Don become lost in a Venezuelan river jungle. The children steal a canoe from a gang of murderous bandits only to float deeper into a world inhabited by vampire bats, Jesus frogs, anacondas, and killer crocodilians. While they find much in the jungle to fill them with wonder and delight, Rosita and Don fast realize that even some of the outrageously funny adults along the river might harm or even kill them. The Wild Part shows readers a world of comedy, beauty, and danger through young, unjaded eyes and reminds us all of times when rules were merely guidelines, when the chaos of the present hour offered limitless possibilities, both dangerous and beautiful

The Wild Part

Literature & Fiction

Jerry, Craven

Literary

Acting as himself in his essays and as various protagonists in his stories, the author shows us a hunger for a vanished world of natural splendor and ideal love.  The essays are persuasively strong, rising to a thematic climax in the powerfully reasoned  "Environmentalist as Misanthrope."  As for the matching antiphonal stories, they delight with their surprise endings and several-"The Swimmer," "The Bright Side," "Assassinations" -may best be described as small masterpieces.        Both the essays and stories that comprise Field Guide share a feature I call "page richness," a literary quality that causes the reader to savor certain pages before continuing toward the conclusion, as one might pause on a long journey to enjoy especially appealing vistas.  Writers either have this ability or they don't.  Steve Sherwood has it.

Fieldguide, Essays and Stories

Sherwood, University Steve

Those interested in reading engaging accounts of scientific observations about a wide variety of plants and animals will do well to read Dr. Fail's short essays. A bonus in this small treasure trove of information is Dr. Fail's habit of introducing people and incidents into each essay. These are folk you will enjoy meeting, for all are eccentric, sometimes in bizarre ways. In these pages you will meet Daddy-Pop, the author's weird, brilliant, and often comical grandfather whose love of plants and animals inspired Gail to give much of her life to studying biology. Other essays tell of Gail Fail's siblings, who are all, she says, a bit odd. And there are other family members, friends, and colleagues whose life experiences get stirred into the delightful stories and unusual facts about cats, water bears, Brewers blackbirds, orb weavers, wild grapes, devil babies, and many other living things.

Memoirs of a Biologist

Science & Math

Fail, Gail

Biological Sciences

This is an account of family stories with a determined emphasis on showing what happened when two people in the arts spawned three children who also became artists. In this, Jan Seale's latest book, Jan presents a biography of her family's immersion in the arts. The book examines how every member of the family, parents and their three sons, became accomplished artists, each in a different art form.

Nature Nurture Neither

Parenting & Relationships

Seale, Jan

Parenting

The first stories in this baker's dozen are set in the fictive Guess County, Oklahoma, and trace the county's evolution from the times of folk lore to today's manicured tourist traps. In them you will meet the shape-shifter Jake Skin, a pioneer couple who bring life back into their relationship by saving the life of an infant, and adolescents shedding their youth while coming to terms with their place and heritage. The Guess County tales are accompanied by stories set somewhere else. Two stories investigate "gothic" mental states, two stories have their origins in the Vietnam war, and two stories deal with creative urges and loving obsessions. The last story is a fanciful creation tale. Welcome to Oklahoma and Else, a territory where there is violence, guile, and survivor's guilt, but where there is also hope and music, even in a glass of wine

Oklahoma and Else

Williams, Paul H.

United States

Within hours of arriving in Malaysia, Amarillo cowboy Noland Fritch and East Texas artist Kent Day face both dangerous criminals and over-zealous local police. While some of the thugs who confront Noland and Kent in the streets of Kuala Lumpur seem harmless and comical, others, especially those trafficking in sex slaves and drugs, prove to be serious in planning to murder the two Texans. The "detective" who searches for and follows Noland and Kent is a bumbling playwright who hopes to catch the two by writing and producing a play about them.

The Jungle's Edge

Craven, Jerry

Award-winning poet Katherine Hoerth's 'The Lost Chronicles of Slue Foot Sue' opens with a poem presenting the birth of a wild Texas red-headed woman who springs full-grown from an ear of corn. She rides away--no doubt on one of those quarter horses on the cover--to vanish in the distance on the High Plains of Texas with the skyline of Amarillo on the horizon. Katherine Hoerth's vision of mythical women stretches to the moon and back. These giantesses rollick, gallop, swim, sass and morph, cutting their own paths before the eyes of astonished men. Experiencing the antics of such mega-women as Slue Foot Sue, Lobo Girl, and Serena finds us re-aware of the ancient myth-making practice and delighting in Hoerth's imaginative flair for exercising the art. Her womenfolk tickle our fancy with a giant feather.

The Lost Chronicles of Slue Foot Sue: And Other Tales of the Legendary

Hoerth, Katherine

Poetry

This barnburner novel gets underway with parallel catastrophes: the murderous Russian invasion of Baku in 1990 and the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan that destroyed the city in 1221. Thus begins a fascinating tale of alternating time planes when a misstep in either might alter--or abolish--history in both. The authors tease us with classic time-travel paradoxes--the butterfly effect, the predestination paradox, the nature of time, and above all, the moral choice Tejmur must make to kill or spare the life of Genghis Khan. But while these alternatives enrich the narrative and open up possibilities undreamed of in our supposedly linear time, they do not supplant the prevailing human qualities of love and loyalty. The possibility of time travel remains unsettled, but there is no doubt about its grip on our imagination. 'Parallel Hours' is one of the most skillfully crafted work in the genre.

Parallel Hours

Co-authors Terry Dalrymple, Jerry Craven and Andrew Geyer deliver the excitement promised in the title and then some as they propel the reader through pages of love, lust, betrayal and redemption. The sixteen interlocked narratives move at a clip through time and space, from the Civil War to the present, from sun-scorched brush country to the lush and sometimes lethal Piney Woods. Although readers may detect shades of Hawthorne and Faulkner in the haunted houses, serial characters, disembodied voices and rattling family skeletons appearing in these stories, their ethos is distinctly Texan, complete with fields of swaying bluebonnets, sprawling ranches, a champion roping horse and plenty of three-alarm chile. The authors deftly sidestep stereotypes, however, instead showcasing such unexpected characters as a cowboy who hates cattle, a parrot that curses mailmen, and a Hill Country farmer who prays to the Roman goddess Fortuna. Reading this story cycle is like doing a jigsaw puzzle--there's no mistaking the satisfaction of snapping that final piece into place and admiring the master narrative that suddenly emerges.

Dancing on Barbed Wire

Geyer, Andrew

Dalrymple, Terry

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Angelina River Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Angelina River Press