Marfa for the Perplexed by Lonn Taylor gathers fifty short historical essays about the people of Marfa, Texas. Taylor, who worked for more than twenty years as a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, spent the last years of his life writing a memoir inspired by the work of Bobbie Louise Hawkins and contributing brief stories about Texas and Texans, in the people's history mode, for Marfa's local paper, The Big Bend Sentinel. Marfa for the Perplexed is a great introduction to Marfa and its history.