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The Austinist Guide to the Texas Book Festival
With each new “abbriev” and addition to the lexicon of lolspeak, the collective literacy of the country plummets ever so slightly. Children in the year 2025 won’t know who Shakespeare is, but they’ll livetweet their toilet training. Right, everybody? Or maybe reading isn’t dying, and the problem lies with certain folks crying wolf - the same talking heads, by the by, who tried to worry us into water barrel investment prior to Y2K. Either way, those alarm bells are sounding, and Time magazine’s cover story on Jonathan Franzen called “the American literary novelist” a “perennially threatened species.” Uh oh.
Before you freak, here's just one counterargument - the Texas Book Festival taking place at the State Capitol Building the weekend of October 16 and 17. The festival, created in 1995 by none other than Laura Bush (a featured author this year as well!), will host more than 200 of these endangered species known as American authors, and they expect 40,000 bookworms to participate in the weekend’s various panels, signings, etc.
To keep you from feeling overwhelmed, we’ve compiled a handy list of some of the festival’s main attractions, helpfully condensed into bullet points for those of you slowly going illiterate.
- Bushies In addition to First Lady Laura Bush supporting her memoir Spoken From the Heart, notorious crony Karl Rove will also be appearing to discuss his new book Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. Rove now controls W.’s brain remotely, giving him the opportunity to travel at his own convenience.
- Baracking You Gently As if to help prevent the GOP from dominating the book festival (how weird would that be?), several of the featured authors will be talking about the current president. Jonathan Alter wrote about the presidency thus far with The Promise: President Obama, Year One, and William Jelani Cobb discusses the election and more with The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.
- Getting Gritty The Festival this year features a number of authors whose true-life tales rival the craziness of fiction. Malcolm Beith’s The Last Narco is about the hunt for drug lord El Chapo, and Ingrid Betancourt writes about her kidnapping in 2002 with Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle.
- The Internet, Now in Book Form You could look at the internet for free…or you could buy a book and read it. Mike Bender and Doug Chernack’s Awkward Family Photos has looked into photographs of matching denim and naked people with their cats for a few years now.
- Ooh, Shorty Some interesting short fiction is appearing at the Festival: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book The Thing Around Your Neck “highlight(s) the surface tension between African and Western cultures as felt through a host of affecting, resilient, often female characters,” and The Spot by David Means explores death by drowning, robberies and other sundry things.
- Books with “America” in the title If you don’t want to read about America, you’re a traitor. To that end, the very wide-eyed H.W. Brands has written not one but two books for you - American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900 and its sequel(?) American Dreams: The United States Since 1945. Stephen Fried turns away from subjects including supermodel Gia and rabbis to explore entrepreneurs with Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Build a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West, and Hank Stuever brings us Christmas way too early with Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present.
- Food Stuffs The only thing better than enjoying a delicious meal is reading about one. Alton Brown further squeezes out money from the "Good Eats" franchise with his latest, Good Eats 2: The Middle Years. Melissa Clark scores points by naming a chapter in her book In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite “Things with Cheese,” and
- Dirty Sexy Texas Lots of books about Texas - another reason our book festival is superior to the Nebraska Book Festival (that, and the fact that ours is actually happening this year). Alison Macor delves into regional film with Chainsaws, Slackers and Spy Kids, Karen Valby explores a town really called Utopia (paradise is apparently just an hour and a half west of San Antonio), and Jeff Wilson takes pictures of empty football fields in his photo book HomeField: Texas High School Football Stadiums from Alice to Zephyr.
- Novels Many novelists will be at the festival, including folks we’ve interviewed and talked about like Doug Dorst, Owen Egerton, Jake Silverstein, and Philipp Meyer. Also, expect interviews from writers like Jennifer Egan and Joyce Maynard in the forthcoming weeks.
- KIDZ! One of the Texas Book Festival’s biggest draws has got to be the glut of kid-friendly authors set to appear. The creators of improbable characters like Super Chicken Nugget Boy (Josh Lewis), the Pals in Peril (M.T. Anderson), and Smurglets (Alan Birkelbach) will all be appearing. And we’ve got two big fights planned for the weekend: Bob Shea’s Dinosaur vs. The Potty and Chris Barton’s Shark Vs. Train. Our money’s on the toilet.
