At Nodder Butte, Robin, a recent graduate of geography, begins work for the National Weather Service with a Native American climatologist. As well as the science of her work, she learns to observe in ways she hadn't imagined, and experiences the strangeness and mystery of desert life. Her co-worker is a Navajo seer who refuses to accept his gift. The novel explores the consequences of this refusal, and its effect on Robin.

In these tales, Marablo is a participant at the Creation in Genesis. Wagner’s Ring retells a creation cycle—one in many cycles. Moving Backward engineers a reverse in evolution. Sacha Artist presents the artist as creator with the problems any creation offers to its maker. The Stone Mason is an extension to the New Testament. The Mycenaead relates the Trojan War from the palace at Mycenae. Solomon Bar-Levin is a fresh story of Barabbas in the New Testament. Finally, The Other Ring is my appendix to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

When the venerable historian Norman D. Brown published Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug in 1984, he earned national acclaim for revealing the audacious tactics at play in Texas politics during the Roaring Twenties, detailing the effects of the Ku Klux Klan, newly enfranchised women, and Prohibition. Shortly before his death in 2015, Brown completed Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys, which picks up just as the Democratic Party was poised for a bruising fight in the 1930 primary. Charting the governorships of Dan Moody, Ross Sterling, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson in her second term, and James V. Allred, this engrossing sequel takes its title from the notion that Texas politicians should give voters what they want (“When you cease to deliver the biscuits they will not be for you any longer,” said Jim “Pa” Ferguson) while remaining wary of federal assistance (the dole) in a state where the economy is fueled by oil pump jacks (nodding donkeys). Taking readers to an era when a self-serving group of Texas politicians operated in a system that was closed to anyone outside the state’s white, wealthy echelons, Brown unearths a riveting, little-known history whose impact continues to ripple at the capitol.