For a couple of months now, there’s been a handsome, new, city magazine in Dallas, Tribeza, covering home decor, dining, nightclubs, culture. And it’s just gone monthly. In addition to all my other duties around town, I write a column on the arts for the magazine (don’t ask me to explain the name — cool, though, isn’t it?). And if you haven’t seen the publication, you can start getting caught up with my column on how Dallas lacks a great novel about the city:

“Many fine short-story writers have taken a crack at the cities of Texas (Donald Barthelme, Antonya Nelson, Rick Bass), but by 1988, twenty years after Larry McMurtry’s essay, so few serious novelists had paid attention to our little outpost on the prairie that journalist Lawrence Wright was moved to pen In the New World, his memoir of growing up here. The city is so unexamined, he wrote. When artists try to capture your town, you see more. It gains texture. A powerful author can shape a region’s sense of itself. A century afterward, we still see London through Charles Dickens’s eyes, through Arthur Conan Doyle’s eyes.”