They Imagine Texas - Kevin McDermott

They Imagine Texas is the story of six lives, two deaths and Perros Salvajes County.

On a vacant Sunday morning a 28-year-old teacher, Katherine Moliere, is out for a solitary run when she observes a man in a playground knock his son to the ground. Moliere, righteous in her way, intervenes. The man Moliere encounters is Tibor Rauscha, prominent in Texas politics and the wealthiest person in Perros Salvajes. When Moliere crosses his path Rauscha has recently divorced wife one and is engaged to wife two, Fanny DaCosta.

None of them know it but Moliere's encounter at the playground has set in motion a sequence in which little things blow up into big ones. When they cross paths again four years later one death has already happened. Weeks later there will be another.

Even then, Texas is not finished with Katherine Moliere.

They Imagine Texas has been called "a broken-hearted comedy." It is a story of haunted lives and haunted houses, and a guide to the categories of justice and mercy. With camping and tacos.

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Kevin McDermott has worked around the world and written from everywhere-including Texas. His career has included journalism from France for The Washington Post and Saveur, from England for The New York Times, and from Haiti for The Atlantic. His poems and short stories have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. A short story drawing on his reporting from Haiti, "Magic ' Hidden Things," was listed among the distinguished short fiction in that year's edition of Best American Short Stories. His play, Our Intoxication, was a production of the Manhattan Theatre Festival in New York, where he lives.

McDermott's previous novel, Fortunes Neck, earned comparisons to Sherwood Anderson and Tom Drury. Fortunes Neck was a New England Book Festival nominee and was subsequently nominated for the PEN/New England Award and the American Book Award.