La vida brinca—life jumps—and yet we strive to capture its passing moments by creating images. One of the simplest yet most evocative techniques for image-making is pinhole photography. Using a tiny aperture without a lens to shine light on a piece of film, pinhole cameras accumulate light until an image forms. Bill Wittliff calls the cameras he makes tragaluces, "light swallowers." By controlling only the size of the aperture, the distance to the film, and the length of the exposure, he makes images that forsake the documentary realism of traditional photography to disclose instead the presence of the mystical in the everyday world. The tragaluz photographs in La Vida Brinca record iconic images of Hispanic life. Wittliff photographed fiestas, religious observances, street scenes, people's faces, and enduring rural landscapes. But with the soft focus and surprise elements that typify his tragaluz photographs, these images become dreamlike—scenes from a world where, as Stephen Harrigan says, "reassuring touchstones are likely to dissolve, and where the unseen is always startlingly on view." The accompanying essays by Harrigan and Elizabeth Ferrer discuss the history and techniques of pinhole photography, as well as Bill Wittliff's artistic choice to work in this medium. As a work of art, La Vida Brinca reveals that pinhole photography is an ideal vehicle for finding profound meaning in the commonplace, for seeing beyond what the eye can see.

The Devil’s Fork opens with the boy Papa exclaiming, “They was gonna hang my o’Amigo Calley Pearsall out there in front a’the Alamo down in San Antoneya come Saturday Noon and if I was gonna stop it I better Light a Shuck and Get on with it. And I mean Right Now.” And so Papa and his sweetheart Annie Oster set off to rescue Calley, thereby launching themselves into another series of hair-raising adventures. The Devil’s Fork concludes the enthralling journey through wild and woolly Central Texas in the 1880s that began in The Devil’s Backbone and The Devil’s Sinkhole. Papa springs Calley from jail, but their troubles are far from over. Framed for murder, the two amigos have to flee for their lives. Joining their flight this time is o’Johnny, the evil Sheriff Pugh’s disabled little brother, who has uncanny abilities. Escaping danger for a while, Papa and Calley try to start a new life as horse traders, only to find themselves branded as horse thieves when o’Johnny and a mysterious white ghost horse begin rescuing abused horses from their masters. Can Papa and Calley escape the noose and save all the horses that Johnny and the White Horse liberate? Or will their own hot tempers send them down the Devil’s Fork, from which no one ever returns? Proving himself a master storyteller once again, Bill Wittliff spins a yarn as engrossing as the stories his own Papa told him long ago, stories that inspired The Devil’s Backbone, The Devil’s Sinkhole, and The Devil’s Fork.

A respected guide for creatives, artists and photographers alike, Pinhole Photography is packed with all the information you need to understand and get underway with this wonderfully quirky, creative technique. Covering pinhole photography from its historical roots, pinhole expert Eric Renner, founder of pinholeresource.com, fully explores the theory and practical application of pinhole in this beautiful resource. Packed with inspiring images, instructional tips and information on a variety of pinhole cameras for beginner and advanced photographers, this classic text now offers a new chapter on digital imaging and more in depth how-to coverage for beginners, as well as revised exposure guides and optimal pinhole charts. With an expanded gallery of full-color photographs displaying the creative results of pinhole cameras, along with listings of workshops, pinhole photographer's websites, pinhole books and suppliers of pinhole equipment, this is the one guide you need to learn the craft and navigate the industry.

A special edition to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Lonesome Dove miniseries

Austin Film Festival (AFF) is the first organization of its kind to focus on the writer’s creative contribution to film. Its annual Film Festival and Conference offers screenings, panels, workshops, and roundtable discussions that help new writers and filmmakers connect with mentors and gain advice and insight from masters, as well as refreshing veterans with new ideas. To extend the Festival’s reach, AFF produces On Story, a television series currently airing on PBS-affiliated stations and streaming online that presents footage of high-caliber artists talking candidly and provocatively about the art and craft of screenwriting and filmmaking, often using examples from their own films. This book distills the advice of renowned, award-winning screenwriters who have appeared on On Story, including John Lee Hancock, Peter Hedges, Lawrence Kasdan, Whit Stillman, Robin Swicord, and Randall Wallace. In their own lively words and stories transcribed from interviews and panel discussions, they cover the entire development of a screenplay, from inspiration, story, process, structure, characters, and dialogue to rewriting and collaboration. Their advice is fresh, practical, and proven—these writers know how to tell a story on screen. Enjoy this collection of ideas and use it to jumpstart your own screenwriting career.

Betty Adcock brings fierce insight to her seventh poetry collection, Rough Fugue. Her elegant stanzas evoke bygone moments of beauty, reflection, and rage. “Let things be spare,” she writes, “and words for things be thin / as the slice of moon / the loon’s cry snips.” Adcock’s poems are often spare but never thin, shifting effortlessly from the eerie red of brake lights on a Texas highway to the fluorescents of an office building where a tired worker imagines a holiday in Spain. Adcock reflects upon her poetic forebears, chronicling the desire to write that led them to create cuneiform tablets, scrolls of papyrus, and ultimately vellum and parchment. She also recounts memories about the life with her late husband and tries to define herself in the bewildering new role of “widow.” In poems ranging in tone from playful to reverential, Rough Fugue showcases the work of a veteran poet at her masterful best.

For the past several years, photographer, screenwriter, and author Bill Wittliff has been placing photographic paper inside beer cans, tubes made of PVC, and other cylindrical containers and affixing them to posts, trees, and other vertical supports on his Plum Creek Ranch near Luling, Texas. Wittliff pokes pinholes in the containers and allows the sun to “paint” on the paper over periods that can last anywhere from a few days to a year. The resulting solargraphs are, as art photographer Kate Breakey suggests, a record of “the slow turning of the earth, without the details: the gradual passing of time at Plum Creek.” In SunriseSunset: Solargraphs from Plum Creek, this relentlessly inventive writer and artist has gathered some of his favorite creations, offering them as a visual tribute to the interaction of a particular place within the great arc of the cosmos. He shares with readers his delight upon discovering the technique through a chance encounter. He confesses an infectious enthusiasm for harvesting such unpredictable products of light and time as he roams with his canine companion Louie across a locale he describes as “a continuous miracle. . . . I want to see new worlds on a piece of paper . . . I want to be astonished . . . I’m always greedy for another miracle.” Kate Breakey’s foreword sets an affectionate, thoughtful tone for this stirring artwork, followed by the literary observations of photographer, educator, and artist Keith Carter. But the bulk of SunriseSunset is given over to page after page of mysterious, other-worldly, evocative images etched by “the slow turning of the earth” and the fertile imagination of the author.