In this gonzo history of the “City of the Violet Crown,” author and journalist Joe Nick Patoski chronicles the modern evolution of the quirky, bustling, funky, self-contradictory place known as Austin, Texas. Patoski describes the series of cosmic accidents that tossed together a mashup of outsiders, free spirits, thinkers, educators, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, and politicians who would foster the atmosphere, the vibe, the slightly off-kilter zeitgeist that allowed Austin to become the home of both Armadillo World Headquarters and Dell Technologies. Patoski’s raucous, rollicking romp through Austin’s recent past and hipster present connects the dots that lead from places like Scholz Garten—Texas’ oldest continuously operating business—to places like the Armadillo, where Willie Nelson and Darrell Royal brought hippies and rednecks together around music. He shows how misfits like William Sydney Porter—the embezzler who became famous under his pen name, O. Henry—served as precursors for iconoclasts like J. Frank Dobie, Bud Shrake, and Molly Ivins. He describes the journey, beginning with the search for an old girlfriend, that eventually brought Louis Black, Nick Barbaro, and Roland Swenson to the founding of the South by Southwest music, film, and technology festival. As one Austinite, who in typical fashion is simultaneously pursuing degrees in medicine and cinematography, says, “Austin is very different from the rest of Texas.” Many readers of Austin to ATX will have already realized that. Now they will know why.

Let's Make Letters! is a playful and informative workbook that encourages play, creativity, and even making misaktes along the way. The book features instructional, speculative, and approachable exercises in an effort to build reader's skills, curiosity, and confidence. Creation of handmade letters by providing readers with more than fifty exercises to create their own unique letterforms. Let's Make Letters! includes exercises that range from simple lettering basics to the expressive and experimental - with imaginative prompts and tips to go beyond the margins of the book. Fail! Make ugly letters! Have fun! Designers, artists, scribblers, teachers, and students are encouraged to take up new and familiar tools to draw, depict, and distort letters in original and inventive ways. It's up to the letterer - pen in hand - to complete the book. By enabling letterers to draw, paint, tape, cut, and glue directly into its pages, Let's Make Letters! will fill a void in hand-lettering publications.

With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.

Austin is an oasis of creativity in Texas. Food ranges from mom-and-pop eateries and eclectic food trailers to high-end, chef-driven restaurants, and all of them have received a warm welcome from the community. East Austin is home to taquerias and barbecue joints, while north Austin claims some of the city's best Vietnamese and Korean cuisine. Austin Chef's Table is the first cookbook to gather Austin's best chefs and restaurants under one cover. Including a signature "at home" recipe from more than fifty iconic dining establishments, the book is a celebration of the city's creative food scene. Full-color photos throughout capture Austin's eclectic eateries and highlight fabulous dishes and famous chefs.

A collection of photographs by Laurence Parent which profile the beauty of the Texas mountains.

A native Texan who lived and worked in the Austin area for more than twenty years, Joshua Long is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at Franklin College Switzerland in Lugano, Switzerland. --Book Jacket.

Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities. While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."