Robert Penn Warren, Karl Shapiro, Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Bukowski, and Denise Levertov are but a few of the outstanding authors whose works grace this celebration of fifty years of ""Descant"", the literary journal of Texas Christian University. This retrospective traces the journal's history from its beginnings as the product of a literary discussion group modeled after the Vanderbilt Fugitives to its recent years as a critically acclaimed small magazine that receives thousands of submissions and offers annual awards for fiction and poetry.The anthology begins with a memoir by Betsy Colquitt, who served as the journal's editor for nearly forty years and who, along with Louise Cowan and the TCU ""Fugitives,"" founded descant in 1956. The early years of ""Descant"" had a distinctly local flavor and featured such young talents as Bill Camfield, who would later become a pioneer writer and performer in children's television, and William Barney, who would become Poet Laureate of Texas.But Colquitt had an uncanny ability for recognizing and publishing promising writers from across the nation, and soon descant was an established literary voice. Since Colquitt's retirement in the mid-1990s, the editors of ""Descant"" have continued the tradition of publishing both emerging authors and established writers such as William Harrison, Clyde Edgerton, and Andrew Hudgins.

Dave Kuhne's The Road to Roma and Other Stories takes you into the gritty, often poignant worlds of a Fort Worth car wash owner, a pair of college students hitching their way to Mexico, and a young man who lets his misplaced love and ambition pull him into the drug culture of post-Vietnam-era Austin. These award-winning stories showcase the talent and wit of a consummate Texas writer whose fiction reflects an intimate sense of character and place.

Africa has long captured the Western imagination as a land shrouded in danger and mystery. British and American novels written before World War II established popular conventions and stereotypes about Africa that have been increasingly challenged by contemporary American novels set in Africa. Kuhne's book overviews the ways in which Africa has been employed as a powerful setting for American novels written since World War II. Kuhne argues that contemporary American novels with African settings are largely didactic, that these novels convey specific lessons about Africa and Africans, and that they compare African and American cultures in order to evaluate and critique the two worlds.

The book begins by summarizing the conventions and themes Westerners have traditionally associated with Africa and by detailing how British and American authors from Aphra Behn to Ernest Hemingway depicted Africa before World War II. It then looks at contemporary American novels set in invented African nations, novels that typically suggest that the problems that trouble actual African nations are the result of colonialism. A separate chapter then examines the African novels of African Americans, which generally aim to correct the historical record, refute stereotypes, and detail the horrors of the slave trade. The volume also looks at genre fiction set in Africa, while a final chapter discusses postcolonial novels with African settings.