ArmadilloCon is just like any other literary convention: It just happens to be about science fiction, fantasy and interstitial literature. The three-day convention (see our advance coverage here) wrapped up Sunday, and the emphasis was often on the practical side of writing and getting published. It's events like this that firmly debunk the trite and tedious stereotype that science-fiction enthusiasts are a virginal male hive-mind entity that has never done anything outside of their parents' cellar. Take the all-female fantasy-romance panel or the fact that over half the writers on the Forever Wars panel about military science fiction were actually former service personel (including Dave Duggins, guest of honor Joe Haldeman and local author Elizabeth Moon) as proof of that. The H.P. Lovecraft discussion on Saturday night kind of degenerated into a moderator's worst nightmare, where the audience knew more than the panelees (although, to be fair, there were several published Lovecraft essayists in the crowd.) But a recurrent theme was the interplay between genre literature and other media, most especially film. The quick synopsis? Big money, big money, no whammy. Read More | Comment »

With Austin's homegrown science fiction literature gathering ArmadilloCon hitting the big 30 this weekend (read our coverage here), it's going to be a time for swapping stories. Co-Chair Kirk Baty had one to share about one of the con's more famous alumni. "I was flying in from New England," said Baty, "And I hadn't seen (panelist) John Quarterman in while, and we met on the Friday evening." Baty being a computer chip designer and Quarterman being the founder of the Texas ISP Association, they got to talking tech shop. After a while, they noticed they had been joined by a silent acquaintance. "William Gibson is standing right there next to the two of us. We figured he'd interrupt if he wanted anything." 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 »

You’ve probably heard about a little thing called Twilight, Stephanie Meyer’s insanely popular YA series about vampire teenagers in Oregon. Book release parties have been planned all over the country – and in Austin – to celebrate the Aug. 2 release of trilogy capper Breaking Dawn, but eBook enthusiasts will have to learn a lesson in delayed gratification, as the electronic book release has abruptly been delayed by a full 24 hours after the hardback. According to a press release by local eBook merchant BooksonBoard, Breaking Dawn publisher Hachette Book Group apparently only announced the delay in an email sent out July 29, after business hours, citing concerns that eBook customers in certain time zones would receive the book prior to hardback customers in line at their local bookshop. BooksonBoard’s director of operations, Kurt Johnson, expressed his frustration via an email he sent me this evening: “We are infuriated, on behalf of our customers, and even our competitors’ customers, [and] the entire ebook community, who pre-ordered this title in good faith based on the information we provided, which was made available to us originally saying that it would be available at the same time as the hardcover release.” Read More | 2 Comments »

Macondo, the annual writer’s workshop launched by San Antonio writer Sandra Cisneros starts this week. The workshop is only open to member writers (aka Macondistas), but the week is always capped off by a public event featuring prominent writers brought in to lead the week’s workshops. This year’s event takes on a Mexican wrestling theme, featuring literary heavyweights in Macondo Libre, a world class word wrestling event. Read More | Comment »

Former Austinite Zach Plague appears at BookPeople tonight in support of his debut novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring (Featherproof), a dizzying mixture of obsessive typography and design wrapped around a bonkers tale of sex and drugs. Another local link: the cover photo is by our own Mary Sledd. Fellow authors Amelia Gray and Ryan Markel join in for a reading of their work at 7pm. Check out Thursday's issue for a review of Plague's book. Read More | Comment »

If you're a teen girl, or you used to be a teen girl, or maybe once upon a time you dated a teen girl, or mothered one, then you know it can be a terrifying, isolating experience, full of mixed messages and fumbling boys undone by a bra snap. Sometimes you just want to feel like you're not alone, and that's where PaperDolls Magazine comes in.

With an admirable mission statement that pledges to not use girls "to sell products," the ad-free online magazine aims to cover "everything from health and sex, to media and art, to fashion and DIY projects." It was started by locals Jordi Finlay, Erin Gentry, and former Austinite (and much-missed Chronicle proofreader) Sofia Resnick.

Two-thirds of that equation will be at the PaperDolls launch party on July 26 at Ruta Maya from 6-9pm. They're advertising bands, a craft table, and free haircuts (really? 'cause that's kind of awesome). Event info can be found here, and you can check out the first issue of PaperDolls here when it goes live in August. Read More | Comment »

The University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center – unsurpassed in both the quality of its collection and in its ability/buying power to lure talent – figures strongly in a recent article in the UK's Guardian. (Last year, The New Yorker ran a fascinating profile of the HRC and director Tom Staley here.) The gist of the Guardian piece is that better-funded American universities are monopolizing the archives of British writers. In a bit of a bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you move, British author Jim Crace, who recently sold his papers to UT (and was interviewed here in the Chronicle), had this to say about his recent trip to Texas: "When I was at the Ransom Centre [the Texas university archive], I held Blake paintings and Coleridge notebooks in my hand. I couldn't help thinking that they didn't belong there." Many a British university archivist would say amen to that. "Two things are inevitable: death and Texas," one of them was heard to sigh. (Hat tip: The New Yorker's Book Bench) Read More | Comment »

Further incentive to pick up a book, from yesterday's Globe and Mail: "A group of Toronto researchers have compiled a body of evidence showing that bookworms have exceptionally strong people skills." (link via The New Yorker's The Book Bench) Read More | Comment »

John Wesley Coleman is the guitarist for them rowdy Golden Boys, but did you know he's also a poet, and (sorta) knows it? The wonderful folks over at Monofonus Press are putting out "American Trashcan," a collection of JWC's musings, written in 2005 during what he calls "January Bad Writing Month," with illustrations by Colleen Matzke. As self-deprecating and self-aware as Wes can be throughout his prose, "Trashcan" is also funny and revelatory in that 4am-can't-sleep-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life? kind of way. The book also comes with a CD of the same name. To celebrate, Wes reads from his book Saturday at the newly opened Domy Books, and plays with a mariachi band. Painter Michelle Devereux and video artist Max Juren will also have exhibits on display. 7pm. Read More | Comment »

Austin lost a native daughter and rising star last week when Shannon Leigh Lewis, age 20, died from injuries sustained during a cave diving accident in Florida. As a talented teenaged writer, Shannon Leigh turned performer when she and her mother, music professor Sheila Siobhan, began making the Austin poetry slam rounds. The two met slam master Ron Horne and the Texas Youth Word Collective was born. Shannon dazzled audiences at the Brave New Voices youth poetry slam festival, and snippets of her performances can be seen in Carl Brown’s moving documentary, 2nd Verse. She appeared in the sixth season of Russell Simmons' HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and last year came in third among individuals at the National Poetry Slam. (Shannon was profiled here in the Chronicle prior to the 2007 Nationals held in Austin.) Shannon had been a college student in Atlanta at the time of her accident on June 14. During her dive at Ginnie Springs in Florida, something went horribly wrong. She indicated to her partners that she was experiencing some discomfort and would return to the surface to investigate. What happened after that is a mystery, as she was discovered unconscious by a diving instructor, Mike Woods, while he and his wife were preparing to float down the Sante Fe River. Woods signaled to another diver, Steven Howe, and along with a doctor who’d been staying in the area, the group was able to bring Shannon to the surface, clear her lungs of water and bring back her pulse. She had been in critical condition at Shands HealthCare, University of Florida in Gainesville until she passed away in her sleep on June 30. Read More | Comment »

Since those halcyon days of deep-pocketed patrons are long gone, struggling writers typically have to make do with the occasional grant or free lit mag subscriptions. But for the lucky few – three so far – there's the pinch-me-I'm-dreaming Keene Prize for Literature, a not-uncontroversial $50,000 jackpot delivered annually to one University of Texas student or recent graduate. (In its two previous years of existence, the award amounted to $90,000, the world's largest student prize; this year, the top dog gets $50,000, while another $50,000 is divided between three finalists.) The 2008 Keene Prize for Literature goes to playwright George Brant, who was previously a finalist in 2006 and is a recent graduate of UT's Michener Center for Writers. In fact, all of this year's finalists are either current Michener students or recent grads, and all the Keene Prize winners since its inception in 2006 have been culled from the Michener Center ranks. I got nothing but love for the Michener Center (MCW '06, holla), but I do understand others' frustration at the mighty Michener's absolute dominance – one expressed by Seth Harp, a former economics major and the lone undergraduate finalist in 2006, in an impassioned 2007 Op-Ed in The Daily Texan titled "Give non-Michener writers a chance": "If an undergraduate ever wins, I vow to read James A. Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific" aloud, in its entirety, from the top of the Tower, clad only in this editorial." See ya next year, maybe? Full press release after the break: Read More | Comment »

Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland melds a native Dutchman's immersion in the Staten Island school of cricket with his harrowing account of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in which he and his wife, splintering under the stress, "were trying to understand, that is, if we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow." Netherland goes to some pretty dark places, but it's also very finely written and one of the best-reviewed books of the year. O'Neill will be at BookPeople tomorrow (Thursday) at 7pm to share some of that finely written stuff with you. Read More | Comment »

The Austin Public Library Foundation is a nonprofit that raises private funds to "help support and strengthen Austin's public libraries" – with priority number one being the proposed breaking-ground of a new Downtown library by winter 2011, with an eye toward opening in spring/summer of 2014. But multi-million dollar Central libraries that overlook Lady Bird Lake don't just build themselves, and that's where you come in. This weekend, APFL and new executive director Tim Staley host the annual fundraiser Texas Tales, and they've got a lovely-sounding evening at the Mexican American Cultural Center planned. Supper, sweets, and "Texas-inspired libations" (which we assume does not a six-pack of Lone Star per paying customer?) will accompany an evening of music by Jon Dee Graham, with an appearance by author Joe Nick Patoski and the emcee stylings of KVUE anchor Olga Campos. Tickets to the Saturday night event run $125; that includes a signed copy of Patoski's new book Willie Nelson: An Epic Life. For more information, or to purchase tickets, visit the APFL's site here. Read More | Comment »

Austin author, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and terrorism expert Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11) was interviewed in this past weekend's This American Life episode for a piece called "The Spy Who Bugged Me," in which Wright details, quite chillingly, how he discovered that his phone had been tapped under the Terrorist Surveillance Act. Information on how to sign up for the free podcast can be found here. Read More | Comment »

The New York Times' Books blog, Paper Cuts, has a recurring thread called "Living With Music," in which authors write about their perfect playlists. I was thinking about this as I set down to blog about The Black Cab Sessions, the site where musicians like St. Vincent, Spoon, and Daniel Johnston can be seen singing a single song in a taxi cab as it roams the streets of London. I'd wandered onto the site because, after months of not listening to Bon Iver at all, I suddenly had to watch everything the Internet had to offer of him (Bon Iver is the recording name of singer/songwriter Justin Vernon; Darcie Stevens wrote about him in relation to licensing here). I hadn't stopped listening to Bon Iver on purpose – I'd just sort of forgot. Moved onto newer loves. You know what it's like – when you get crazy-obsessed with a song (like "Skinny Love"), and you just wanna curl up in the sound and stay there forever. And then a week passes, or a month, and you sort of forget. You caught a bug for a while, and then you got better – or worse, depending on your point of view. I don't think I'm alone in that I feel best, my most ragged and alive, when caught in the clutches of something or someone else. Read More | Comment »

We haven't had a chance yet to look at local author Paul JJ Payack's A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting the World (published May 1 by Citadel), but we did spend some time bumming around his popular website LanguageMonitor.com. The site tracks buzzwords from realms political, pop cultural, and tech, as well as announces any new additions to the lexicon. According to the countdown clock, we're only 4,156 words away from hitting the million-word mark in the English language. The latest to be codified? Read More | Comment »

Shopping a book? Thinking about shopping a book? Thinking about someday writing a book that maybe eventually you might want to shop? Then you might want to take advantage of the 2008 Writers' League of Texas Agents & Editors Conference. It's the largest publishing conference in Texas (now in its 15th year of operation), with more than 400 authors, agents, and editors in attendance – including 23 different literary agencies and a whole host of media contacts, too – all eager to drop some knowledge on you about how to get your book out of the desk drawer and into the world at large. Preregistration is required to attend the conference, which runs June 20-22 at the Sheraton Austin Hotel (701 E. 11th St.). Registration's a bit pricey – $354 – but Writers' League members get a break at $309 (further incentive to join organization). Wanna know more? Check out writersleague.org. The conference schedule's already up online – panel topics include book promotion, buzz-building, revisions, and industry trends; other highlights include pitching sessions and a keynote address by Publishers Weekly Editor in Chief Sara Nelson. Read More | Comment »

What do John Hagee's "Christian Zionist" San Antonio megachurch, 9/11 Truthers, and the U.S. Congress -- notably, among them, Texas Rep. Joe Barton, R-Arlington, have in common? Narcissism, for sure, and certainly a most unhealthy penchant for intellectual dishonesty. As a group, to Rolling Stone reporter and author Matt Taibbi, the triad are more alike than not, and together perfectly illustrative of the Great Derangement. The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, is Taibbi's latest election-year offering, exploring how the absence of a "commonly accepted set" of facts has splintered the American psyche, leaving it adrift, primed to believe even the most unbelievable -- like President George W. Bush's post-9/11 "conclusion" that we were attacked because the terrorists hate "our freedoms." Please. Is there any doubt we're seriously deranged? In Taibbi's estimation, the answer is clear: We're fucked up. And in this latest book, he sets out to prove just that. Read More | Comment »

I suppose it says a lot about the changes in my life that while at Book Expo America trying to talk the world into buying my novel Evacuation Plan the celebrity author I was most excited to meet was David Shannon. If you haven't heard of Shannon, aka Diaper David, then you don't have a young child. In the diaper through kindergarten set, Shannon's series of crudely drawn (on purpose) Diaper David books has the cult-like status of Harry Potter.
Shannon, already a respected children's illustrator, got the idea for the books when his mother sent him a self-portrait he drew at the age of 5. Thus was born Diaper David, who makes messes, resists naps and is generally lovable. My son Nicholas latched on to the first of the books and we now own the full set, plus another book about Shannon's real-life dog Fergus, who is also Diaper David's pooch. Read More | Comment »