Tehano
A novel of Nineteenth-century Texas

ALLEN WIER

Thursday, October 26, 2006

6:00 pm reception, followed by lecture at  6:30 pm, then book signing following lecture. 
DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

With vivid and authentic detail and a storm of narrative power, Allen Wier's Tehano brings together historical and imagined events, giving readers a sense of the final years of the nineteenth century—a time both brutal and majestic—that spawned our present time. The disparate narrative skeins are collected through the efforts of Gideon Jones, a westering wayfarer who sets down his adventures and those of the people whose path his crosses.

"Tehano is a rich, ambitious, satisfying novel."
—  Larry McMurtry

"Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove has become the novel about the Old West by which subsequent similar novels are judged.  Allen Wier's epic Western just might be the one to finally give McMurtry a run for his money."
—  Tom Walker, Denver Post

"This is a novel that sticks. It has the smell of lived life, the  rattle of a world long gone. It rouses and compels, not least because Wier has a true yarn, outsize and grand, to tell. His is an American West fetched up whole and mythic, more dust and wind and high sky and idiom per page than anything this side of Larry McMurtry."       
—   Lee K. Abbott, professor of creative writing at Ohio State University

"Allen Wier has imagined a way to express an epic vision of the American experiment at its crossroads. From the antebellum era, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wier's sizable cast of characters—African American freedmen and slaves, Native American warriors and their women, Confederate and Union veterans, immigrants, and citizens high and low—pitch up in Comanche territory in Texas, enacting their destinies. Wier has breathed new life into representative American men and women in a style alive with realism, soaring with lyricism, and vibrant with humor. His understanding of the Native American and the African American experience is stunningly uncanny."
—   David Madden, Donald and Velvia Crumbley Professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University

"An extraordinary accomplishment: a novel of Tolstoyan scope. Here is the palpable savage young country itself, and its people with all their loves, fears, passions, hopes, dreams, and sufferings—human souls searingly brought forth from the swirl of history. It is a great work of fictive Art, and to my mind perhaps the finest achievement of my generation, no less."
—   Richard Bausch, professor of English and Heritage Chair of Creative Writing at George Mason University

"A genuine masterpiece.  A magnificent work."
—   George Garrett, Henry Hoyns Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia

ALLEN WIER has published three other novels, Blanco, Departing as Air, and A Place for Outlaws, and a story collection, Things About to Disappear. A former Guggenheim and Dobie-Paisano Fellow, Wier has had fiction, essays, and reviews appear in such venues as Southern Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and The New York Times. A Texas native, Wier currently teaches in the writing program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville

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Last updated May 22,2006.