UT announced today the winners of the 2010 Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowships – prestigious writing awards that involves both an extended stay at the 254 acre Paisano ranch and some cold hard cash. Texas Monthly columnist and much-loved comic novelist Sarah Bird (How Perfect Is That) won the Johnston Fellowship, for writers more established in their career; runners-up include two Michener graduates, poet Bruce Snider (The Year We Studied Women) and Philipp Meyer (whose debut novel American Rust earned great reviews this spring). The Jesse Jones Fellowship, earmarked for up-and-comers, went to activist and author Diane Wilson, who most recently published the memoir Holy Roller: Growing Up in the Church of Knock Down, Drag Out; or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus; fiction writers Ana Marcela Fuentes and Stacey Swann (also the American Short Fiction editor) were runners-up for the prize. For more info about the Dobie Paisano fellowship, go here. Full press release after the jump. [Editor's Note: The original post mistakenly reported that Ana Marcela Fuentes is editor of American Short Fiction; Stacey Swann is in fact the editor of American Short Fiction.]

Joe O'Connell, the Chronicle's film-industry columnist, is a man so often wrapped in old-school celluloid or awash in hi-def pixels by way of making a living, you'd think he had fuck-all time for anything else. He wouldn't be the man to win an award for crafting an excellent prose novel, for instance. Except that he would. He's the winner of the 2009 North Texas Book Festival Book Award in adult fiction, awarded on April 17, up there in Denton. His novel-in-stories, Evacuation Plan, published by Austin-based Dalton Publishing, reveals a segmented narrative of the terminally ill, the patients’ families, and those who care for the dying. His book's an excellent, thought-provoking diversion from our own inevitable plummet toward the grave, and we highly recommend it to you, the living.

Look for Stanley Kubrick's original vision of A.I. and his unrealized Napoleon project to come out in book form this year, the late director's longtime executive producer and brother-in-law Jan Harlan said during a SXSW Film panel Sunday. The A.I. book will include 25 original drawings from Kubrick's earlier vision for the film, prior to him passing the project on to Steven Spielberg. "In Stanley's hands it would have been so dark," Harlan said, adding that Kubrick saw the story really as a "fairy tale" more suited to Spielberg's talents.

We've never understood Austin's inability to sustain more than a handful of general interest used bookstores. We came of age in secondhand shops in North Carolina (well, and coffeehouse open mic poetry nights – thankfully those wannabe-Beat days are long, long behind us). There's nothing quite like the pleasure of trolling dusty stacks and picking up cheap reads that have already been lovingly dogeared, enscribed, underlined by countless others. Which is all to say that it's very exciting business indeed that the Austin Public Library's Recycled Reads Bookstore (5335 Burnet Rd.) will be open for business this weekend. According to APL, "Recycled Reads gives books a second chance and will be an active participant in the City’s Zero Waste Plan by ensuring obsolete materials are handled in an environmentally responsible way by keeping these materials out of landfills." The store's grand opening happens Saturday, Feb. 28 from noon to 4pm, featuring food, drink, and live music from the likes of Jon Dee Graham and Jesse Sublett. Not sold yet? There will be balloons. Go here to find out more, including the store's hours of operation.

Texas music chronicler Joe Nick Patoski will receive the 2009 TCU Texas Book Award for his biography Willie Nelson: An Epic Life. He'll be fêted at a March 19 dinner on the TCU campus, which will be open to the public (provided you pony up $30 for the pleasure of attending). Reservations can be made by calling Barbara Standlee (817/257-6109). Dan Oko chronicled Patoski in these pages back in April. You can also read an excerpt from his biography here.

Austin-based Latinitas, the first digital magazine for young Latinas, hits the streets in an unusual move in this digital age. Instead of going from print to digital, like most publications, they are expanding their online publication to a hands-on paper copy. The print version of Latinitas will be carried as an insert inside El Mundo Newspaper, the Hispanic Newspaper for Austin and Central Texas.

Okay, not that stealth-like, since it already earned a writeup in The New York Times. And what is "it," exactly? Well, some of the weirder product placement we've heard about in some time: Michener Center for Writers graduate Philipp Meyer netted some advance press for his debut novel American Rust... right smack in the middle of another author's book.

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who shares an agent with Meyer, apparently liked his novel so much that she slipped a mention of it into her latest Kay Scarpetta book.

According to the Times:

"On Page 333 of Scarpetta, the title character, a forensic pathologist, arrives at the apartment of a murder victim and meets a police officer guarding the scene. 'He collected his jacket from the back of a folding chair, and a copy of Philipp Meyer’s American Rust from the oak floor under it,' Ms. Cornwell wrote."

The biggest tease is in the fact that Scarpetta was published Dec. 2, almost two full months before Meyer's book arrives in stores. (Its pub date is set for Feb. 24.)

Meyer will appear at BookPeople on Friday, March 13.

A Random House rep just sent out the following e-mail: "It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer. He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed." The hugely prolific Updike was best known for his Rabbit series, as well as for his frequent New Yorker pieces. His last novel, The Widows of Eastwick, came out in October.

On Friday I had the happy task of calling up our 10 finalists for this year's Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest. Good news for them, but, alas, bad news for the almost 500 other writers who submitted this year (almost double last year's number of submissions!).

The winners for the 17th Annual Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest will be announced on Wednesday, Feb. 11 at BookPeople (6th & Lamar) at 7pm. There'll be some munchables, as well as readings of the 1st through 3rd place stories. Come one and come all, and for goodness' sake, submit again next year. Practice makes perfect, eh?