Literary Death Match at the Texas Book Festival [Reading Preview]
Saturday, October 16
Paramount Theater (713 Congress Avenue)
Doors @ 12p; 12:30-1:30; FREE!
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OK. How could you possibly make literature better? Well, for starters, you take out the wimpy friendliness of it all. Next, you get really real and unleash some bloodthirsty writers’ words upon each other. Then some less bloodthirsty but perhaps more famous writers adjudicate on things unrelated to the aforementioned bloodthirsty writers’ words. Then, as one might expect, you make the writers compete in a final round of no literary merit. Which is to say, it is unliterary. There - you made literature better!
Literary Death Match’s mission is to return literature to pop culture significance and get people excited about it. Their means toward that end are giant meat chunks of competition. Four writers will each read seven minutes of their work and a star-studded panel of judges will provide entirely unrelated commentary. In the elimination round a winner is determined by some means other than their work. Not that we wish harm on any of the writers, but we are crossing our fingers for battle axes.
Hosting LDM at the Texas Book Festival means that the judges and competitors are as diverse as they are exciting. So join LDM host Todd Zuniga for big deal novelist Jennifer Egan, National Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz, comedian/memoirist Julie Klausner, zombie/unicorn arbiter Holly Black and more judging and competing as the gladiators of ancient Rome did, except less actual blood. More literary blood, though. So.
