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Southwest Book of the Year Award Winner

Pubwest Book Design Award Winner

Drawing on thousands of years of foodways, Tucson cuisine blends the influences of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy food traditions. This book offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

Both family supper tables and the city’s trendiest restaurants feature native desert plants and innovative dishes incorporating ancient agricultural staples. Award-winning writer Carolyn Niethammer deliciously shows how the Sonoran Desert’s first farmers grew tasty crops that continue to influence Tucson menus and how the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries, Spanish soldiers, and Chinese farmers influenced what Tucsonans ate.

White Sonora wheat, tepary beans, and criollo cattle steaks make Tucson’s cuisine unique. In A Desert Feast, you’ll see pictures of kids learning to grow food at school, and you’ll meet the farmers, small-scale food entrepreneurs, and chefs who are dedicated to growing and using heritage foods. It’s fair to say, “Tucson tastes like nowhere else.”

Since the publication of his haunting, elegiac Goodbye to a River in 1960, John Graves has become one of Texas' most beloved writers, whose circle of loyal readers extends far beyond the borders of his home state. A "regional" writer only by virtue of his gift for vividly evoking the spirit of the land and its people, Mr. Graves is also admired for the unerring craftsmanship of his prose.

Now the University of Texas Press takes great pleasure in publishing A John Graves Reader to introduce his writing to a new generation of readers. This anthology contains selections from Goodbye to a River and his two other major books, Hard Scrabble (1974) and From a Limestone Ledge (1980). It also includes short stories and essays, some of which have never been published before and others that Mr. Graves has reworked especially for this book.

All of the pieces in this anthology were chosen by Mr. Graves himself to be, in his words, "representative of my writing, for better or worse." They reflect various stages of his life and writing career—youth in Texas, World War II, sojourns in New York, Mexico, and Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, and his final return to Texas as home and as subject matter—as well as recurring themes in his writing, from the land and the people to fishing, traveling, and the enduring friendships that have enriched his life.

For those who have never read John Graves, this anthology will be the perfect introduction to the range and excellence of his work. At the same time, those who have read him faithfully for many years will find new pieces to enjoy, as well as old favorites to savor once again.

Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest—among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each act of travel.

Eric Anderson pursues his inquiry through an unprecedented range of cultural texts. These include the Roswell spacecraft myths, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Wendy Rose's poetry, the outlaw narratives of Billy the Kid, Apache autobiographies by Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, New West history by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Frank Norris' McTeague, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, George Herriman's modernist comic strip Krazy Kat, and A. A. Carr's Navajo-vampire novel Eye Killers.