Texas Observer's
Nate Blakeslee
Notes from Evan Smith
"Texas is known these days for so many things -- a thriving music community, a vibrant independent film scene, sports teams at the top of their respective games, dysfunctional politics that bear a striking similarity to those in Washington, D.C., and, to delight of everyone who reads, including magazine editors in need, a stable of writers that any state would be happy to claim.
We have more than our fair share here of novelists and journalists, poets and playwrights -- every fall we salute them at the Texas Book Festival, and every May we celebrate their many accomplishments during Texas Writers Month. And, occasionally, we get them to put down their pens, assuming any of them still write in longhand, and talk about what they're working on.
This week's guests, Karen Olsson and Nate Blakeslee, are no strangers to Texas letters, each having contributed to a variety of publications, including TEXAS MONTHLY, and each having served a stint as co-editor of the weekly Texas Observer. But in late 2005 both Olsson, 32, and Blakeslee, 35, saw their first books arrive in stores.
Olsson, a D.C. native who graduated from Harvard with a degree in math, has written an extraordinary novel about Texas politics called Waterloo -- like The Gay Place some four decades ago, it reads like non-fiction -- a picture-perfect rendering of life, love, and lobbying in a capitol city that seems painfully familiar.
Blakeslee, an Arlington native with degrees from Southwestern University in Georgetown and UT-Austin, has turned his famous Observer expose about tricked-up cocaine busts in the Panhandle town of Tulia into a book-length mediation on the failure of the drug war -- and the storyline is so dramatic that it reads like fiction. Take it from me, folks -- both books are great, and both authors are more than worthy of joining the pantheon of great Texas writers. " - Evan Smith, Texas Monthly Talks, Broadcast 10.27.05
