The Devil's Fingers and Other Personal Essays

The Devil's Fingers and Other Tales is a new collection of personal essays by one of Texas' master storytellers. The more than two dozen essays in this new collection range from travel pieces about Havana and London to stories about small-town exotics that are funny, nervy, outlandish, all characterized by James Hoggard's sly wit and his noted openness to people he meets along the way, including a Saturday morning gathering of khaki-dressed men who have hunkered down at a Dairy Queen to get away from their women who want them to spend the day doing chores. At the same time they see Hoggard as a bicycle-riding exotic who finds it normal to go out and bike 60-odd miles before lunch. Now and then the encounters are hair-raising, sometimes scary. Fast-paced, yet at the same time reflective, Hoggard guides his readers into some of the wonderfully strange turns of the world, at least as much as he did in his previous collection, Riding the Wind, which was haled as "one of the best books ever written by a Texan."