Find out who, out of all 567 entries, stood out the most in this year's contest at the Winners’ Party tonight at BookPeople (losers also welcome). Stay to hear first, second and third place read their winning pieces; afterwards, shmooze with local literati and enjoy free snacks. more ›

If you’re wondering what to do with your Saturday night, why not make good on your New Year's resolution (the one that says: Read more, Facebook less) and get thee to a local bookstore. ZZ Packer makes an appearance at BookPeople tonight at 7 pm, thanks to American Short Fiction, where she'll be talking with writer Jacqueline Luckett about Luckett’s second novel, Passing Love more ›

What is wrong with kids these days? In Ben Marcus' new book The Flame Alphabet their words have become toxic to just about anyone who would utter such a question. The epidemic has spread across the country, and found it's way into the Upstate New York community of our narrator, Sam, through his 14 year-old daughter Ester. His wife Claire and he have become very ill over the past few weeks. Their daughter laughs at their frailty, off-put by how meek and quiet they are. more ›

At the Apple live education event today, the tech giant announced three major items: iBooks2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. Here's a quick rundown. iTunes U offers full courses with video, documents, apps and book. Users can see a syllabus and follow assignments while teachers create posts and update tasks. Its integrated with iBooks notes. iBooks 2 (free) is Apple's attempt at "reinventing the textbook". Citing the iPad's already astounding impact on teachers and students (1.5 iPads in schools, over 20,000 apps used), the app enables you to "read in a text-heavy portrait or picture-biased landscape mode and there's also the option to have random pop-quizzes appear to keep you on your toes. Annotations is an integral part of the system: you can add stickies to individual pages and aggregate them into virtual 3 x 5-inch note-cards for revision during finals. You'll also get the same purchase, download and re-download rights you enjoy in the company's other stores." iBooks Author (free) allows you to start with a simple template and create an iBook with minimal tech know-how. Users will combine their templates, photos, presentations, widgets and videos using HTML5, JavaScript and publish to the iBookstore. Follow the conversation about Apple's announcements this morning and learn more about the new education-focused applications at Macworld, Slashgear, TechCrunch and Engadget. more ›

If you were wondering what ever happened to that chick from The Blair Witch Project, the one who really screwed it up for everybody out there in the woods (Jo-osh? Josh? JOSH?), you'll be glad to know actress-now-author Heather Donahue is alive and well and headed to BookPeople tonight at 7 p.m. to read from her new memoir Growgirl: How My Life After The Blair Witch Project Went to Pot. The book follows her life after the unexpected success of Blair Witch, a low budget horror film that grossed over 200 million dollars and spawned books, comics and computer games. more ›

“A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.” - Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye more ›

Tomorrow night the Paramount is hosting The Moth, a reading series from New York that is now on the road. Tomorrow's presentation will feature readers on the following topic - "Made to Be Broken: Stories About Disobedience." Contributors to this reading include Lt. Dan Choi, Elna Baker, Mike Daisey and George Dawes. Former Austinist columnist Spike Gillespie submitted a piece but will not be performing with the program after all, a choice she discusses on her blog. more ›

Not to get all inside baseball on you, but this review of Shelley Seale's memoir/reportage from her time in India was delayed by an almost tragicomic set of circumstances seemingly destined to keep this book from getting reviewed at all. Throughout it all, Seale was polite but persistent, and after we (finally) had the book in our hands and read it, her dedication to the work came into a wider perspective. Most books have something of import to communicate to the reader, but this true life account of Seale's trips to India in the middle and end of the last decade exposed her to not just tremendous poverty, but to its most helpless and legion victims, children, many of whom are also having their years of innocence wiped away by plagues of disease, forced labor and nothing short of sexual slavery. more ›

On Monday night poet Naomi Shihab Nye spoke and read from her latest book of ultra-short stories, There is no Long Distance Now. The Mabee Ballroom at St. Edward's University was filled with students and fans, young and old. more ›

Note: This post is by new contributor Andrew Hilbert. Tonight, award-winning Texas poet Naomi Shihab Nye will be speaking and signing her latest collection of stories There is No Long Distance, Now. more ›

Those of us feeling bereft and searching for literary meaning after the closing of the Texas Book Festival won't have to wait long at all to get our next book fix. The 28th Annual Austin Jewish Book Fair opens on today, less than two weeks after the conclusion of this year's Festival. more ›

In this Internet age, censorship isn’t much of a going concern in America. Yet, things were different in this country back when cars had a rumble seat, a lady never went out without her gloves and telephones still plugged into the wall. more ›

First up, please read Austinite Michelle Mirsky's second installment of her column "No Fear of Flying: Kamikaze Missions in Death, Sex, and Comedy" on McSweeneys, entitled "My Real Passion Is Improv Comedy." It's heavy, though, so be prepared for that. more ›

Come see Austin-based novelist and short story writer Oscar Casares give a reading tonight at 7:30 p.m. in The Maloney Room at St. Edward's University as part of the Visiting Writers Series. A Brownsville native and Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, Casares now directs the new MFA in English at the University of Texas. more ›

Martha Stallman, a Texas State Master's student and UT-Austin grad has won Playboy's 2011 College Fiction Contest. Her story, Hot Damn (featuring illustrations by Charles Chaisson), tells the tale of a man trying to pick up a social security check. Needless to say, something unexpected happens. Stallman's story is featured in the November issue of the magazine, and she's also won a $3,000 prize. For more information about the contest, go here. more ›

The Harry Ransom Center has acquired novelist J.M. Coetzee’s archives (at an estimated $1.5 million), making him the ninth Nobel laureate to be housed at the HRC -- a lofty list that includes T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Doris Lessing. The archives contain over 150 boxes and filing cabinets of journals, manuscripts (including two Man Booker Prize winning novels: Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace), as well as letter correspondence, interviews, digital and audiovisual materials, and family photographs covering a fifty-year career. more ›

Sometimes you just have to ask. According to Daniel Noll, co-organizer of today's literary salon featuring the contributing editor of Deadspin and author of new book The Postmortal - "[a] few of my buddies and I basically just asked Drew Magary to come to Austin.... and he did!" more ›

This year's Texas Book Festival, which takes place October 22 and 23 at the State Capitol and is free to the public, is shaping up to be tastier than ever - with a plethora of great cookbooks to purchase and many celebrity authors slated to appear. more ›

The Austin Public Library Friends Foundation - also known as the desperately-in-need-of-one-more-vowel acronym APLFF - is presenting the Austin Teen Book Festival on October 1st at the Palmer Events Center. The event runs from 10am to 5pm, and will feature author panels, a keynote speech from Scott Westerfeld, and many opportunities to purchase books from (and have them signed by) authors. more ›

Back for its sixteenth year, the Texas Book Festival's lineup this year is packed with celebrities, award winners, and your new favorite writer(s). Announced this year is a Texas Book Festival "fast-pass" that you can purchase to bypass the long lines for, say, Alton Brown talking about broccoli. Can't remember if the "money = cutting in line" thing was worth it for people who really wanted to ride Splash Mountain - we'll see how it works at a book festival. more ›

This remarkable book, like the hand from beyond the grave depicted on its schlocky cover art, caught us by surprise. In a good way. Penned by seasoned critic Jason Zinoman, who, among other things, covers theater for the New York Times, Shock Value traces the history of what the author refers to as New Horror - a gory, ambiguous, and terrifying brand of the genre that owes less to the over-the-top theatrics of Dracula than to the chilling short stories of H.P. Lovecraft and a remarkable lineage of fine art. more ›

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina more ›

Daniel S. Hamermesh is an economics professor at UT with a new book coming out this month called Beauty Pays. Yesterday, Hamermesh wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times discussing his philosophy around looks and the workplace. He begins with the knowledge that a person's looks impact their experiences in the workplace and beyond (which we already knew) but goes beyond that conversation and into one around equality. How can we even the playing field in the workplace, knowing that some people are discriminated against simply because they're ugly? more ›

We Were Not Orphans: Stories from the Waco State Home is a compilation of memories told in the words of the alumni themselves, now in their sixties, seventies and eighties. Put together by social advocacy marketer Sherry Matthews (whose half brothers attended the school), the alumni’s stories are hardly edited, thus keeping their true voices - voices that weren't heard years ago - intact. The result is a collection of haunting accounts whose depth of specific details pales only in comparison to the gratitude many express in retrospect, in spite of such dire circumstances. more ›

A couple of sources have been reporting this week that Phil Collins - yes, that guy - has completed and is shopping around a book on Texas history. The London Evening Standard says "Collins, 60 - a long-time collector of memorabilia from the Alamo - is now seeking a publisher for his study of Texan history." The Hollywood Reporter goes a step further, reporting that "Statehouse Press is targeting a March 2011 release for the work, titled The Alamo and Beyond: A Collector's Journey." We're assuming they meant March of 2012, and a look on the website for this State House Press reveals no iota of Collins announcements. Still, this developing news is pretty interesting, at least insofar as the book doesn't come with a soundtrack. more ›

With an event entitled See a Little Light With Bob Mould: An Evening of Music and Reading, this is clearly not a typical Bob Mould show - or even a typical concert. That’s because the veteran singer/songwriter/guitarist (still best known for his stint in Hüsker Dü, despite that band having been defunct for nearly a quarter of a century and Mould having built a catalog every bit as strong since, both solo and with Sugar) isn’t promoting a new album on this trek. Instead, he’s hitting the road with both guitar and reading glasses in tow in celebration of <em>See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody, a frank, powerful autobiography that is as compulsive a read as his records are a listen. As such Mould will treat the audience to passages from his book as often as test the tolerance of the sound ordinance. (Mould is one of the few performers whose audience requires earplugs even when he’s playing acoustically.) Given the general brilliance of both the musical and prose sides of Mould’s pen, this gig is likely to be something special. more ›

Seventy-one pages into his book Austin Nights, Herocious (a pen name for Michael Davidson) confirms what the reader has most likely been suspecting - “What you're reading reading is trying to stay formless and free, without limitations and plot.” The book floats from present to past, but the gist of it is this - Davidson, or a character he inhabits in these pages - has left Miami Beach with his girlfriend Bridget to move to Austin. Like so many others, the University is the impetus for their move, and Austin presents both difficult and happy challenges to their worldview. Bridget is also a narrator in Austin Nights, but the story is primarily told through Michael's words. Davidson is prone to the “occasional digression,” as he puts it, and his narrative is quick-moving, often familiar, and occasionally frustrating. more ›

An hour and a half down the road from Austin, and occupying 340 square miles of semi-arid Central Texas terrain, sits one of the world's largest military installations - Fort Hood. Some 50,000 soldiers work on post, making it the largest single-site employer in Texas. As of 2006, 85% of those troops had served at least one tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. more ›

This Friday, June 17th from 3-7 pm, Austin Books and Comics will host the 14 Eisner award-winning creator of Fables for comic signing and fan meeting. Fables tells the tale of folklore and fairy tale’s greatest personalities, all driven from their different worlds by a great foe, the Adversary, and living in a suspiciously hard to find block in Manhattan, called Fabletown. The story smartly modernizes these characters by putting them in a context somewhere past the last page of their stories, or the Disney-version of “happily ever after.” For instance, Prince Charming has been divorced by all three of his destined loves, but does manage to charm his way through a campaign and into office (sound familiar?) for a little while, anyhow. more ›

Have you recently realized (after careful introspection, of course) that your knowledge of Wyoming is decidedly lacking? It's happened to the best of us. Luckily, there's hope! There is a place where you, too, can be filled in on all the wonders of the Equality State. How's this for a wonder? Wyoming's state dinosaur is the Triceratops! Seriously! more ›