Smart people are saying nice things about Welcome to Paradox City, which comes out August. 4 from Deep Vellum, but is now available for preorder.
“No one writes with as much passion about Dallas architecture as Mark Lamster. Who will ever forget his great tirade during the fight over City Hall’s future? Or what about his lovely ode to the little-known Grand Lodge of the Knights of Pythias? Lamster is a true treasure whose writing has defined Dallas, for better or worse.”
— Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly
“Mark Lamster has become the conscience of our city. His message is a cautionary one: no city can become truly great if it continually erases the work of those who came before. With each essay, he holds up a mirror to us—and what we see matters.”
— Laura Miller, Mayor of Dallas (2002–07)
“Brash, inventive, optimistic — Mark Lamster’s adjectives for threatened Dallas City Hall could easily serve as the tagline for this book. Lamster uses his characteristic wit and ear for a yarn to make the characters, conflicts, and beauties of a diverse, still-expanding metropolis come alive, offering a complex look at a city too often dismissed as all shine, no substance.”
— Alexandra Lange, Pulitzer-Prize winning critic and author of Meet Me by the Fountain
“What the hell am I going to say about the great Mark Lamster that the Pulitzer committee already hasn’t?”
— Robert Wilonsky, city columnist, The Dallas Morning News
“Spitting mad, hilariously funny, exasperated, grumpy, yet deeply caring: Mark Lamster gets emotional about architecture, landscape — and Dallas. Telling the stories behind some of his city’s most iconic landmarks, Lamster confronts the base, the sordid, the silly, but also the poignant and sublime. Welcome to Paradox City is a compelling look at the people and the motivations that drive the production of architecture in Dallas: the gaudy, the brittle, the world-changing.”
— Stephen Fox, architectural historian, Rice University
“Lamster’s book profoundly grasps how our city’s architecture helped determine who we are and how we live as a community, and because of that it will help us build a better future. That’s why even when I disagree with him, I always cheer him on.”
— Mike Rawlings, Mayor of Dallas (2011–19)
“Lamster answers the main question first: when did Dallas get a soul? Then he offers a profound and lyrical description.”
— Jim Schutze, author of The Accommodation