When George Garrett wrote of Robert Winship’s The Brushlanders, "Robert Winship has an abiding and powerful sense of place and, even better, compassion for and curiosity about people—the inhabitants," he might well have been writing about Flannery’s Crossing, which, set also in West Texas, focuses on one Arthur Flannery, an aging cowboy, who finds himself resident in a fleabag hotel in Pecos. When Paul Markham, proprietor of the Courtney, begins losing customers because of a freight train that roars past the hotel in the early morning hours, he is helpless to stop it. Flannery saves the day.

A graduate of Sam Houston State University with an M.A. in creative writing, ROBERT WINSHIP is the author of a highly successful collection of short stories, The Brushlanders (Texas Review Press, 1992); and a novel, Every Man Also (Texas Review Press, 1999). Winship’s fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including The Texas Review and The Hawaii Review. For several years he wrote a column, Winship’s Log, which appeared in West Texas newspapers. A native West Texan, he currently lives with his wife, Shirley, on the family ranch, The Rockpile, in Segovia, Texas, an hour and a half west of San Antonio.