Day two of Cine Las Americas sees the regional premiere of José y Pilar, about the love affair between Portuguese man of letters and Nobel Prize winner José Saramago and his wife, Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio. The screening couldn't have been timed better: Today also sees the publication of a collection of early Saramago short stories. Read More | Comment »

Well, this is exciting: Deadline Hollywood reported today that Netflix is thisclose to finalizing a deal with Gaumont International Television to produce a 13-episode series of Hemlock Grove from Austin-based screenwriting partners Brian McGreevy and Lee Shipman. Read More | Comment »

Outside of the publishing industry, “multigenerational family saga” is not really an utterance that trips off the tongue, but in the realm of novels, it is something of a catchphrase. Read More | Comment »

Drew Magary's debut novel, The Postmortal, has a spiky, attention-grabbing cover image of the Grim Reaper impaled on his own death-delivery scythe. It's the perfect visualization of the book's unnerving premise that, in the very near future, aging has been eradicated and humans can lock their bodies in a prime-specimen state. Read More | Comment »

So maybe you, like me, have been hunching the shoulders and slunking in shadows since David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008. Casual readership of his many works won’t fly anymore: Only completists may apply. Maybe the new Decemberists’ video for “Calamity Song,” which explicitly references Infinite Jest, will apply kick to pants? Read More | Comment »

1. Right now I'm halfway through reading John Burdett's The Godfather of Kathmandu, the fourth in his series of vivid Bangkok-set crime novels featuring Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep; I've already read the first three.

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The New York Times reported yesterday that J.J. Abrams, filmmaker (Star Trek) and television innovator (Lost), has tapped Austin author Doug Dorst (Alive in Necropolis) to write a new novel. Read More | Comment »

The antidote to bad sex? Good sex, duh. And Austin author James Hynes has the good stuff. Read More | Comment »

In this week's issue, Katharine Smith reviews Barry Hannah's posthumous short story collection, Long, Last, Happy, which puts us in mind of the time the Chronicle made a pilgrimage to see Hannah in his home state of Mississippi. Read More | Comment »

Yup, writing a novel is hard. But what if you had a community of thousands egging you on? Read More | Comment »

You don't generally think of the Young Adult racks at your local library when  Barry Gifford is the author in question, but Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, has indeed been chosen to, ah, shake up the kids a little. Read More | Comment »

I didn’t plan on reviewing Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – and I’m still not, hence this slapdash blog post and not a formal review in this week’s paper – but I finished the book a week ago and still haven’t shook the damn thing, so there you go. Read More | Comment »

Now that Lost has shuffled off into the bright white light, are you hungry for entertainment aggravatingly ambiguous but shot through with lyrical brilliance? Boy, have we got the book for you. Read More | Comment »

TankBooks is combining two extinguishing passions – cigarette design and printed books – to create these awesome (if dangerously twee) pocket-sized classic reads. Read More | Comment »

All most Hollywood scribes had to show for the 2007 writers’ strike was a strike beard, but Lou Berney went and wrote himself a novel – and a well-reviewed one at that. Read More | Comment »

Mayor Will Wynn announced today the selection for the eighth annual Mayor’s Book Club, the citywide reading program that aims to get Austinites reading and talking about the same book. Following the international bent of last year’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, this year’s selection – the last of Wynn's term – is Dalia Sofer’s debut novel The Septembers of Shiraz, which was inspired by her childhood in Iran. The book will be widely available at Austin Public Library branches and local bookstores. April will be devoted to book clubs and related lectures, culminating in an April 24 event at City Hall with Sofer. Named as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Septembers of Shiraz is described in an APL press release thusly: “It's a fascinating story of one family's unique struggles rooted within the context of a radically changing Iran. Their Judaism has marked them with imminent persecution during the Iranian Revolution. The story vascillates between the domestic struggles of the family members remaining in Iran and the immigrant experience of the family's son studying in New York. Sofer raises numerous universal questions: Do we flee or fight when faced with adversity? How do we adapt to foreign surroundings? How does a family stay together?” For more info, go here. Read More | Comment »

"Ah! there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort." – Emma The weatherman says the temperature won't top 40 degrees today, which makes it the perfect day to celebrate the birth of Jane Austen – that endless fount of wit and witticism, that sly tweaker of social mores, that shockingly sensible romantic – by staying in and curling up with one of her delicious reads. But, if like me, you're stuck at work, then I guess the next best thing is to troll YouTube for the many Austen offerings – I especially recommend 1995's Persuasion and the sparky, protofeminist Mansfield Park (with Harold Pinter!), the definitive BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries (BBC, those cheeky bastards, have the celebrated pond dip up, but won't let me embed it) and Joe Wright's abbreviated, but still very worthy adaptation. But certainly at the top of the charts of Austen moments in film is Emma Thompson's spontaneous sob at the end of Sense and Sensibility. Like I said – the end of Sense and Sensibility, so, you know, spoiler alert. Read More | Comment »

At the time the Texas Book Festival booked Christopher Buckley, they couldn't have known how exquisite the timing would shake out to be. Buckley – who, by the way, is a leading conservative and son of William F. – was supposed to be in town to promote his new novel Supreme Courtship, a D.C. satire, but then The Daily Beast published on Oct. 10 his endorsement of Barack Obama ("Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama") and all hell broke loose. "What a kerfuffle all this has been," said the genial Buckley on Saturday in a conversation led by longtime family friend Steven Isenberg. The occasional mock hem-and-haw that they get back to promoting his book aside, Buckley gamely recounted the spiraling madness that led to his break from leading conservative magazine The National Review – a magazine that his father started and that Christopher maintains partial ownership of. In the wake of his Obama endorsement, which irked some NR readers so that they cancelled their subscriptions en masse, Buckley said he felt the "honorable to do was to offer to resign" – with an emphasis on offer. The offer, he smiled ruefully, "was briskly accepted," thus leading to the rather "awkward position of being fired by something I partly own." Read More | Comment »

You don't need to tell us that talking about books is a hip way to pass the time, but I guess some people still need convincing. To that end, forward-thinking librarians Blair Parsons and Bonnie Brzozowski are rebooting the Austin Public Library's Downtown Book Clubs with new names, new topics, and new non-library homes. The reading material's gotten sexier – graphic novels and contemporary fiction – and now you can sip coffee while you talk with your fellow bibliophile. For now, the new book clubs will set up shop at Halcyon and Little City, respectively, but as APL's Marketing Program Manager Patricia Fraga enthused in a recent e-mail, the soon-to-break-ground downtown central library will have its own coffeehouse/cafe space – "coming soon 2013-2014!!" That should give us just enough time to find the right opening-day outfit...

Schedules for both book clubs after the jump: Read More | Comment »

The Austin slam poetry community will gather to pay tribute to the recently passed, much-loved slam artist Shannon Leigh this Saturday at Ruta Maya. "They Call Me Warrior: A Tribute to Shannon Leigh" will serve as a benefit for Shannon’s family and as a sendoff for the team representing Austin at the National Poetry Slam, in which Shannon competed last year and placed third in the nation. The tribute takes place on Saturday, August 2, at 8pm at Ruta Maya World Headquarters (3601 S. Congress). The organizers have requested a $10 minimum donation; all proceeds will go to Shannon's family. For more information, visit austinslam.com. Read More | Comment »