Goodnight, Texas

William Cobb

oct 2006 · Unbridled Books

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In this lithely told and atmospheric story, a fishing village on the Gulf Coast loses its bearings as its shrimping industry begins to fail. The town of Goodnight by the Sea lies on a peninsula between two bays, Red Moon and Humosa, and for years its people, many of them immigrants drawn to this ragged edge of America, have struggled to get by. When Gabriel Perez, a local shrimper, gets laid off, he also manages to lose his girlfriend, Una Vu, a beautiful Vietnamese-Hispanic waitress who is unhappy with both the smallness of her life and Gabriel’s petty anger. Gabriel blames Falk Powell, a teenage co-worker of Una’s, for stealing her heart and begins plotting a revenge that will take an unexpected turn. Gusef, their unlikely Russian entrepreneur employer, takes young Falk under his wing. All the while, an impending hurricane gathers ominously in the Gulf. Goodnight, Texas is a poignant, powerful, comic, surprisingly hopeful story about a love affair within the beauty of a decaying bayside village, about wanting what you cannot have, and about what happens when a coastal Texas town is swamped by a killer hurricane. Cobb has written a timely vision of resilience and personal survival amidst the collapse of small town American life.

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William J. Cobb is the author of a previous novel, The Fire Eaters, and a book of stories, The White Tattoo. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and in many other journals. He has received numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Sandstone Prize, and an AWP Award for the Novel. He was raised in Texas, and currently lives in Pennsylvania and Colorado. He directs the writing program at Penn State.