Mike Shea on the month’s new releases

David Liss

The Whiskey Rebels

Random House

San Antonio resident David Liss dives headlong into the capital of post-Revolutionary America—Philadelphia circa 1792—and emerges with a pearl of a thriller in The Whiskey Rebels. It’s a two-headed narrative told by Ethan Saunders, an ex-spy who has become a drunkard after being cashiered for allegedly passing secrets to the British, and Joan Maycott, a widow looking to redress the unjust taxation of her late husband’s whiskey trade in the Pittsburgh wilderness. Their interests collide when they become embroiled in a series of stock market plots and counterplots that threaten the newborn Bank of the United States. Saunders is a hilariously insouciant hero in the modern mold (see Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole), complete with the requisite sidekick, Leonidas, a freed slave with a knack for the timely rescue. Their interplay, combined with Liss’s mind-boggling intrigues, makes Whiskey Rebels one of the year’s best reads. Random House, $26

Diane Wilson

Holy Roller: Growing Up in the Church of Knock Down, Drag Out; or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus

Chelsea Green

Life has taken some interesting turns for Diane Wilson, whose metamorphosis from shrimp boat captain to environmental activist was documented in Texas Gold, a multiple-award-winning documentary based on An Unreasonable Woman, her 2005 memoir. Holy Roller: Growing Up in the Church of Knock Down, Drag Out; or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus is her irreverent take on the Pentecostal womenfolk and shrimp-fishing menfolk who raised her and their very different perspectives on life in tiny Seadrift, on the Texas Gulf Coast: By night Grandpa Chief would drag nine-year-old Diane out on clandestine boat runs while by day Aunt Silver would exorcise the demon of Anthony Perkins (yes, the actor) from her body. Wilson writes like a correspondent bemused by the strange goings-on in a foreign land, and Holy Roller is the salt-sprayed Rosetta stone that helps her readers understand. Chelsea Green, $24.95

Tony Vigorito

Nine Kinds of Naked

Harvest/Harcourt

One can almost smell the patchouli wafting off the pages of Nine Kinds of Naked, a neopsychedelic satire from recently transplanted Austinite Tony Vigorito. Channeling the spirited humor of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Vigorito suspends the rules of time and space to create an alternate reality in which a tornado pounces on Normal, Illinois, and propels half a dozen citizens—such as pastor J. J. Speed and housewife Bridget Snapdragon—through portals where their names and roles change with dizzying speed. Tossed like dice between epochs and identities (today an FBI agent, tomorrow a crusader!), their various incarnations finally converge 25 years later in the shadows of a “hypercane” that is stalled off the coast of post-Katrina New Orleans. Despite the sogginess of his rambling sermonettes on love and oneness in the universe, Vigorito’s is a crisp, sardonic voice. Harvest/Harcourt, $14

Darlene Harbour Unrue

Darlene Harbour Unrue
Photograph by Geri Kodey

The professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has written and edited several books about the work and life of Texas literary talent Katherine Anne Porter, who died in 1980. Unrue just edited Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings, an augmented reprint of the landmark volume that won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1966.

Can you briefly describe the arc of Porter’s career?

Her first publication was an amateurish poem for a trade journal in 1912. She worked as a freelance journalist, and in 1930 she published a collection of short stories, Flowering Judas, to critical acclaim. Then came Pale Horse, Pale Rider, in 1939, and Ship of Fools, in 1962, which was hailed by some as one of the greatest novels in the English language.

What about her tumultuous life?

Porter offended conventional society with her vagabondage, numerous marriages and divorces, smoking heavily, drinking at will, and taking ill-chosen lovers almost to the end of her days.

Can you share one line that captures Porter’s essence?

“Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country; for the illusion of being more alive . . . But experience is what really happens to you in the long run, the truth that finally overtakes you.” The Library of America, $40 (Read the full interview.)