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Charles Alcorn has lived in and written about Texas his entire life. A former all-state linebacker, Alcorn founded Splendid Seed Tobacco Company, was a sportswriter, and worked as a packaged goods copywriter before receiving his Ph.D. in English Literature/Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Houston. Alcorn's is the author of short story collection Argument Against the Good-Looking Corpse (2011, Texas Review Press). Beneath the Sands of Monahans is his debut novel. Alcorn currently lives in Edinburg on the US-Mexico border.
"""As perhaps the most misunderstood and maligned state in the union—a whole other country, the ad campaigns remind—Texas can lead its writers into easy caricature and superficial exploration. But in Beneath the Sands of Monahans, Charlie Alcorn goes deep. His vision and depiction of twenty-first-century Texas, its culture, criminals, and economies, suffuses each page. With a rich and contemporary cast of characters and a plot as equally engrossing as it is breathless, he anchors his book to Archie Weesatche—ex-jock, entrepreneur, gambler, and dreamer—who is equal parts Jeff Rink and Duane Jackson and a creation all Alcorn's own. You may not sanction every decision Archie makes on his wild and frightening ride, but you'll certainly fall for his reckless charm. This is Alcorn's Texas, and boy does he wring out of it a novel like no other."" —Tom Williams, author of Don't Start Me Talkin', an NPR Favorite Novel of 2014"
