ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Stephen Harrigan is the author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestselling novel The Gates of the Alamo and the award-winning Big Wonderful Thing. Harrigan's work as a journalist and essayist has appeared in many publications, especially Texas Monthly. Harrigan has received several lifetime achievement awards, including the Texas Medal of Arts.

REVIEWS

These are resplendent and revelatory essays—filled with rare insight, peerless reporting, and Harrigan’s characteristic generosity of heart. An Anchor in the Sea of Time lays bare the mystery and beauty of a life in Texas, and it proves beyond any argument that in the canon of Texas writers, no one matters more than Stephen Harrigan. No one.

— Bret Anthony Johnston, author of We Burn Daylight: A Novel

In one of my favorite pieces in this collection, Stephen Harrigan writes about the "puzzling power" of statues, and locates it in their ability to "cast a spell of stillness." His prose, with its deceptively easygoing style, frequently does the same thing for me. This is a book about the problem of memories—whether personal (the father Harrigan never got to meet) or cultural (the renovation of the Alamo)—but the essays vibrate with a curiosity more outward-gazing than backward-looking. Maybe it's truer to say this is a book about the strangeness of time. A consistently thought-provoking read.

— John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead: Essays

No one is better at delving into what's fascinating and maddening about Texas than Stephen Harrigan, and An Anchor In The Sea of Time proves it. From his quest to understand his own family story to his exploration of the state's underexplored tribal history, this is a book written with warmth, humor, and truth.

— Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

[Harrigan's newest book] might look modest next to his sprawling works like The Gates of the Alamo or Big Wonderful Thing. But don’t be fooled—this collection of essays spans vast territory: history, memory and how Texans make sense of both.

— Texas Standard

There’s a point in [Harrigan's book] where I moved from simply enjoying his voice to outright admiring him not only as a writer, but as a human being...Most of us don’t stay open to the world and refuse to be knocked from our soapboxes, but Harrigan does just that throughout the collection, mixing memoir and journalism, questioning his own memories and prior stances, without dipping too deeply into nostalgia...Like a gentler Larry McMurtry, Harrigan interrogates the conflicts over how to represent history.

— Southern Review of Books

I’m such a fan of Stephen Harrigan’s writing that if he copied names out of a phone directory, I’d parse through them for some meaning...In [this collection], he ponders who he is, where he fits in, and the mystery that still surrounds those questions, even in his seventies...This book is a Whitman’s Sampler of treats by one of the stars of the West Austin School of Writers. I highly recommend you pick up a copy.

— West Austin News

Harrigan delivers a vivid collection of essays on time, identity, and memory...[in] lucid and genial prose...The result is entertaining and thought-provoking.

— Publishers Weekly

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Off Course
Dreaming in the Dark
History and Longing
A Double Date with Leatherface
The Voice in the Tree
The Art of Low Expectations
The Small Screen
Twilight of the Bronze Age
Something Went Wrong
The Heirloom
Karankawas
Discovering (and Remembering) Vietnam
The Story of a Magazine
An Anchor in the Sea of Time
Acknowledgments