Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).
This month’s Novel Night authors are Judi Taylor Cantor and Marc Hess.
Judi Taylor Cantor will be reading from Rich White Trash, the saga of an enormous―and sometimes crazy―Catholic family living in Austin, Texas. Marc Hess will read from Gillespie County Fair.
Rich White Trash gives you mystery, love, death, and a heapin’ cup full of Texas. Land, oil, cattle, drugs, sex, religion, rebellion, gun running, politics, and patriotism collide with dreams and dysfunction in this wild, quarter-century ride. The Landry family’s 700-acre ranch in the hill country outside Austin was a goldmine the family could always rely on, and patriarch VF Landry believed it would keep his eight children tethered to their roots. But between verbal and physical abuse at the hands of their beautiful mother, their father’s obsession with Texas politics, and their own occasional knock-down, blowout fights, the eight Landry kids were determined to live life on their own terms―even if that meant trouble. In this sprawling chronicle, secrets are revealed. Apocryphal treasures are found. Fortunes are made and taken away. And in the end, the land wins.
Author Judi Taylor Cantor is a native of Austin, Texas (she grew up in Travis Heights), and a 1976 cum laude graduate of the University of Texas in Austin. With a background in journalism and copy writing, she is currently the Director of Planned Giving for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. Judi works with donors to shape their legacy, and writes newsletters, brochures, and ads for Harvard Public Health magazine, as well as articles for professional journals. Parents to three grown sons and grandparents to 11 grandchildren, she and her husband live in Massachusetts. She misses Texas sunsets and the tympanic sound of rain on a dusty road. Rich White Trash is her first novel.
The Gillespie County Fair, the oldest fair in Texas, looms insistently over the shoulder of Marc Hess’s new novel. As rampant land development and tourist money begin to transform the old German farming community of Fredericksburg, two intermarried pioneer families lock in a life-and-death struggle over the sale of their homestead. Their vicious feud in an otherwise harmonious and bucolic community leads to the demise of two pioneer families and culminates in the triumph of one hard-headed young girl. This book delves into the clash of new wealth and ingrained poverty as rural Texas grapples with a changing world. In a short period of time, the town of Fredericksburg has morphed from a rock-rimmed farming community into the chic tourist destination that it is today. While the town itself has blossomed, this is the story about a family that destroys itself.
Marc Hess has lived in Fredericksburg long enough to see this rock-rimmed German farming community morph into the chic tourist destination that it is today. Steeped in a career of magazine publishing and travel writing, Marc has served on the Board of Directors of the Writers’ League of Texas.