lystn

Houston-native author Reginald Gibbons, a national book award finalist whose Texas-set novel SWEETBITTER is forthcoming August 1. SWEETBITTER takes place in east Texas in 1910 during the time of white rule-not by law but by lynch mob. Amid the suffocating racism and fear, half-Choctaw, half-white Reuben Sweetbitter and Martha Clarke, a white woman, fall in love. This is an authentic, richly detailed novel with themes of sacrifice, fear, and the loss of one's identity, inspired by Gibbons' family -- whose paternal grandfather was half-Choktaw -- and his experiences growing up in protestant evangelical Texas.

Brad Gilmore:How did Houston and Texas in particular shape you as an author?
Reginald Gibbons:Well, it did a lot of shaping, I think because my father was a, was a salesman from his car. He sold small items to small, independent grocery stores. These don't even exist anymore. The chains killed all that, but I used to get to ride with him at work when I was a kid, for example. And we'd go out around outside the city limits. We'd go to a little, a little grocery store owned by a Chinese proprietor one owned by a Japanese proprietor, one owned by a black proprietor. And I would see all these different kinds of interactions and I, I learned a lot about how people live.

SOURCE: https://bookshop.org/p/books/sweetbitter-reginald-gibbons/19865347