The Texas Book Festival announced its 2012 slate today, featuring big hitters in fiction (Junot Díaz, Justin Cronin) and nonfiction (Robert Caro, Douglas Brinkley, Cheryl Strayed, Naomi Wolf), plus pop culture personalities branching out (Jewel, Tony Danza).

Was Austin’s O. Henry the Original Slacker? That’s the case being made in a new exhibit at the O. Henry Museum, which will celebrate the 150th birthday of the legendary short story writer, that titan of twist endings, this Saturday, Sept. 15.

Two graduates of UT’s Michener Center for Writers made the news this week for their novel work.

Pop quiz: What's the best three-birds/one-stone way to celebrate Bilbo Baggins' birthday, support a good cause, and show off your no doubt sizable nerd skills?

When singer-songwriter Bill Callahan went on tour to promote his 2011 record Apocalypse, filmmaker Hanly Banks and her camera tagged along for the U.S. leg. The result – an “hour-long concert film/tour documentary/psychedelic thingamajig” – has its Texas premiere at the Stateside on Sept. 14.

The Austin Public Library Friends Foundation shines a light on Texas’ big hitters in literary achievement with its second annual Illumine Awards.

Matt Bondurant turned his family’s real-life bootlegger history into the hyperviolent 2008 novel The Wettest County in the World, which has itself been turned into the new film Lawless, starring Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf. Bondurant and Willie Nelson will be at a special rescheduled sneak on Aug. 25.

David Rakoff, a humorist and frequent This American Life contributor whose personal essays ran the gamut from blackly comic observations on life to rapturous accounts of arts & crafts projects, has died. He was 47.

Austin's annual sci-fi/fantasy convention kicks off today and runs through the weekend.