Recommended

The questions novelist, playwright, and poet LeAnne Howe asks in her new novel Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, $11.95) are both political and suspenseful -- a noteworthy success, since it's the blight of the left to keep forgetting that people like to be entertained, not harangued. Howe sets out to determine why Red Shoes, the most formidable Choctaw warrior of the 18th century, was assassinated by his own people, and why, more than 200 hundred years later, Native American historian Auda Billy stands accused of murdering Choctaw Chieftain Redford McAlester. Without a trace of awkwardness, Howe, who won the Before Columbus Foundation's 2002 American Book Award for Shell Shaker, moves between Red Shoes' life and McAlester's strange death, and the women they both influenced. Howe will be at Book Woman (918 W. 12th) on Monday, April 29, at 7pm... The kick-off party for Texas Writers Month honors Liz Carpenter, author and former press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson and the star of this year's Texas Writers Month poster. The party is open and free to the public, and takes place at the LBJ Library and Museum (2313 Red River) from 7-9pm... Kathleen Cambor, the former director of the creative writing program at the University of Houston, is coming to BookPeople on Thursday, May 2, with the newly released paperback of her historical novel, In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (HarperCollins, $12.95). Cambor re-imagines the notorious Johnstown flood, in which 2,209 people were killed when the South Fork dam broke above Johnstown, Penn., on Memorial Day, 1889, because the rich owners of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club ignored repeated warnings that the dam was in precarious condition. "For immersion in another time and culture, with generous dollops of romance and tragedy (both domestic and historic) on the side, Kathleen Cambor's In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden may be just the thing," we wrote last year, when the book first came out in hardback.