William J. Cobb is a novelist, essayist, and short fiction writer whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The Mississippi Review, The Antioch Review, and many others. He’s the author of two novels—The Fire Eaters (W.W. Norton 1994) and Goodnight, Texas (Unbridled 2006)—and a book of stories, The White Tattoo (Ohio State UP 2002). He reviews books for the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, and the New York Times. He lives in Pennsylvania and Colorado, and may be contacted at wjcobb@gmail.com.
The masthead image is of two-year-old Lili Cobb on the porch of a house in the desert of West Texas, near Terlingua.
Thanks: That’s my darling Lili on the porch of a cool adobe house in the West Texas desert, near Big Bend National Park, where its owner, Marcos Paredes, works as a park ranger. In the desert just beyond that porch area we saw a constant stream of Vermilion Flycatchers, a brilliant red bird. I own an adobe house too, and think they’re the best.