Five of the best books about Texas

Rick Bass’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. His memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His new novel is All the Land to Hold Us.

One of Bass's five favorite books about Texas, as told to The Daily Beast:

An Unreasonable Woman
by Diane Wilson

Diane Wilson’s An Unreasonable Woman? ... It will change your life. Wilson is a maximum bad-ass single mother of five, a shrimper who singlehandedly fought Formosa Chemicals in Seadrift, Texas, to a zero-discharge policy. An incredibly harrowing adventure tale; I won’t give away the ending, but it’s a corker.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Attica Locke's five books on Texas, and The Great Texas Novel, part 1 and The Great Texas Novel, part 2.

--Marshal Zeringue