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Author Harry Hunsicker Joins EarBurner to Talk Trees, Murder, and Writing

Authors talking to authors. It's more interesting than it sounds.
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Harry Hunsicker—novelist, D Magazine contributor, commercial real estate appraiser, this week’s EarBurner guest—did not talk about his upcoming short story in our July issue in his conversation with Zac and Tim at the Old Monk yesterday. It’s a shame, because Tim has a pretty tasty boilerplate for it: “A meth-fueled Ferris wheel ride.”

If that’s up your literary alley, Hunsicker’s someone you’ll want to get acquainted with, if you haven’t already. He published his first book in 2005, finding himself taken by exploring the dark stories that were possible within the city of Dallas. Each of his seven novels have something grounding his characters here; in fact, the setting is treated as its own character in many ways. Here’s how he describes the plot of his first book, Still River:

It’s not easy being named Oswald, not in the city where Lee Harvey grabbed his fifteen minutes of infamy and choked it to death. It’s especially hard when half the town seems determined to kill you for reasons as murky as the river that splits the city in two.

In April, Hunsicker’s latest novel, The Devil’s Country, hit stores and Kindles and other E-book ephemera. Spoiler for the show: He reveals it’s likely the beginning of a series, a sort of Jack Reacher set in West Texas, with, as Zac put it in his review, “a rogues gallery of prototypical Texan bad guys, from religious cult leaders and corrupt small-town cops to hillbilly Nazis and greedy bankers in gleaming downtown Dallas high-rises.”

There’s a bit about that, a bit about commercial real estate appraisals, and a bit about a prominent Dallas attorney who has a burger named after him and likes to throw parties. It’s a good one.

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Show notes:

1. First things first, buy Harry’s book! Here’s a link on Amazon.

2. Dallas Hates Trees. Zac told you so in 2015. Which is to say, it’s alarming that they’re still being whacked down throughout the city. It happened up north on Forest Lane, to make some storage units visible from the road. And it happened yesterday in downtown Dallas, where developers sliced them to make room for a grand plaza outside Trammell Crow Center.

3. For better or worse, here’s a piece to help you better understand Councilman Philip Kingston’s relationship with city staff.

4. Here’s the thin piece on Fort Worth’s murder rate going up 70 percent.

5. This is a 10 year old story about attorney and noted party thrower Steve Stodghill.

6. Here’s a link to buy The Next Time You Die, the second in the Lee Henry Oswald series.

7. The video preview of Kindle in Motion is pretty neat.

8. This is Zac’s profile of Ben Fountain, and here’s The New Yorker’s take.

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