The World Horror Society sure gets around: This year's convention was held in Winnipeg, next year's will be hosted by Brighton, England, and in 2011, the World Horror Convention touches down in our fair city. ("Does it help that Austin is home to the largest urban bat colony in the world?" wonders our friends at Slackerwood.)
You've got some time to plan – like we said, 2011 – but convention co-chair Nate Southard has already announced Sarah Langan (bestselling author of The Missing and The Keeper) as the guest of honor. Of the selection of Austin as host city, Southard had this to say:
“Texas has a long history of strange fiction, serving as home to such luminaries as Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, and Joe R. Lansdale ... Bringing the World Horror Convention to Austin is a natural. It’s a vibrant city with a taste for the eccentric and a love of the arts. Further, its central, southern location makes it convenient for travelers throughout the US, and visitors from abroad will have no trouble reaching us either.”
Speaking of Lansdale, he's profiled in this week's Chronicle; Lansdale's new Hap & Leonard novel Vanilla Ride hits shelves this Tuesday.
Jefferson & Hemings scholar Annette Gordon-Reed will bring some of her Pulitzer-winning process to Austin this weekend
Presidential scholar Annette Gordon-Reed first came to acclaim with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which explored not just the long-rumored affair between Jefferson and Hemings but also the history of scholarship about the pair – how authors have historically ignored, denied, and denigrated evidence of a long-term relationship between the president and his slave. (DNA evidence now confirms Hemings and Jefferson had at least one child together.) In her 2008 book,The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, Gordon-Reed circles back to the couple and broadens her scope to trace a multigenerational exploration of black and white relations in Jefferson's household and the still-new America at large. Gordon-Reed, a native Texan, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, and she'll be the headline speaker (11am) at Austin's African American Book Festival this Saturday (6/27).
This year, the spotlight is on Dreams of Me: Narratives of Black Women Writers; also appearing will be Wall Street whiz Carla A. Harris, the author of Expect to Win: Proven Strategies for Success from a Wall Street Vet (11am); Anita Richmond Bunkley (Between Goodbyes), who won the 2007 Career Achievement Award Winner in African American Fiction from Romantic Times Magazine (12:30pm); and Bernice McFadden (Sugar), who also writes, er, spicier fiction under the nom de plume Geneva Holliday (1:30pm).
All events are free and held in or on the grounds of the Carver Branch Library and the Carver Museum and Cultural Center (1161 Angelina). The program, which will also include children's activities such as storytelling and facepainting, runs from 10am to 4pm – check out the AABF website for exact times.
If you missed Robert Jensen June 9 for his scheduled Bookpeople reading, it’s not surprising – it’s been postponed until July 29, although several local web sites (including Jensen’s own UT homepage) have not yet caught up with the change. As it happens this time, the peripatetic journalism professor and prolific writer and activist was undergoing minor surgery, and was not off again on one of his frequent journeys – New York, Minnesota, Colorado, South Africa, India, Pakistan – all places he visits in his persistent and earnest efforts to help create the international cultural revolution. His literary efforts – on media, politics, internationalism, feminist theory, pornography, or all of the above – are equally eclectic, although his latest turn may most surprise his readers, as it somewhat did this one, a friend of several years.
All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, paper, 194 pp.) is an extended meditation on Jensen’s tentative return to the Presbyterian church of his youth. The book carries an ecstatic Old Testament title (Jeremiah 23:9), and the cover features a 1967 photograph of the eight-year-old third-grader Jensen, holding his newly awarded bible, at the Fargo, North Dakota, First Presbyterian Church. Since those halcyon days – when he says he was simply “bored, nearly to death” by church – he had become a journalist, a professor, a writer, a committed left activist, and had lost virtually all his small youthful interest in matters of official religion.
It might take a sec to wrap your brain around the concept behind the regular series Five Things: We're gonna take a cue from the title and call it a multimedia thingy involving awesomely talented Austin folk, but cohost Stacy Muszynski's description of a "literati/musical/performative event" is a lot more elegant.
The theme of this month's event is Photographs. Five authors – Amanda Eyre Ward, Jennifer Pashley, Aly Tadros, Perry Tyson Midkiff II (who, fyi, won second place in our last Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest for his terrific story "May the Passenger Pigeon Sing Thee to Thy Rest"), and Sigers Steele – will tell stories based on the photographs of five photographers – Mary Sledd, Suzi Q, Sarah Gonzalez, David Jewell, and David Hill – followed by music from the likes of Jamie Panzer, Legs Against Arms, and Zapata Sparrow. Hosting the evening will be series masterminds Muszynski and Amelia Gray (whose new brand-spanking-new book of flash-fiction AM/PM is on the top of our to-read pile).
Five Things: Photographs takes place this Friday, June 5 at the (very happily reopened) United States Art Authority next to Spiderhouse Cafe (510 West 29th). Doors open at 7pm (come early for a special acoustic set by Aly Tadros). Admission is $1. For more info, go to fivethingsaustin.com.
If you happened to pick up Roy Blount Jr.'s linguistics book, Alphabet Juice, you've surely recognized, as our reviewer did back in November, that he's "an unimpeachable digresser." And if you've ever listened to him on NPR's weekly call-in quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, you already know he's a quick, dry wit, able to perform brilliantly in punchline.
Today and tomorrow, you've got a chance to see both facets of Blount Jr. – the long and short of him, so to speak. Tonight's Writers League of Texas benefit, An Evening with Roy Blount Jr., on the St. Edward's campus, promises hors d'oeuvres and dessert with wine and an audience with Roy. Go here for ticket information – and move fast: The event starts at 7pm. And tomorrow, he'll be on hand for a local taping of Wait Wait at Bass Concert Hall, alongside fellow panelists Kyrie O'Connor and Charles P. Pierce. The taping's already sold out, but you can hear the Austin episode on May 30 on KUT 90.5 at 10am.
Although Marion Winik (The Glen Rock Book of the Dead) hasn't lived in Austin for years, the memoirist/NPR commentator/former Chronicle contributor is still awfully beloved in these parts, and rightfully so: She's a funny and candid chronicler of her life (which has been rocked by the kind of tragedy that would render most people mute). She's terrific in person, too, which is why we heartily recommend you to her reading at BookWoman this weekend.
The particulars: Sunday, May 24, 3pm at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar Blvd. #a-105)
And here's a link to the interview we ran in advance of Winik's appearance at last year's Texas Book Festival and Austin Jewish Book Fair.
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.]
The Literary Object under Consideration in this Post
Yes, he's all of 12 years old.
Not the author, no, he's thirtysomething, a writer and a filmmaker who's touring to promote this new book of his ~ The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet ~ and will be at Bookpeople on Wed., May 13, at 7pm, to do just that. His name is Reif Larsen, by the way: A blonde and dapper and rather Michael-Joplin-looking fellow. And, from what we've read thus far, one hell of a fine writer.
The 12-year-old we speak of here is T.S. Spivet, the book's protagonist, who receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian because he's won the prestigious Baird Award for the Popular Advancement of Science. So he sets off from his parents' home in Montana to eventually incur the wonder and glories of Washington, DC ~ making maps of everything as he goes. Ah, but that's just one layer of this multileveled story, a story rich with historical and emotional layers and bordered (literally, on page after page) with the maps and illustrations and notations of young Spivet.
We imagine that if you set off on your own journey to Bookpeople this Wednesday night, you'll incur a few literary wonders and glories of your own as Reif Larsen shares with you a highlight or two from within his compelling work.
We'll have a proper tribute to Bud Shrake in our Thursday print issue, but in the meantime, we point you to our archives – most particularly to this interview conducted in 1985 by Chronicle Editor Louis Black. In it, a funny and forthcoming Bud Shrake talked about his career in the movies, from taking Hollywood actor Cliff Robertson to court in Travis County ("He showed up looking like somebody who had gotten dressed at the Salvation Army discard barrel") to Dennis Hopper's run-in with revolutionaries on the Mexico set of Kid Blue.
Rumors were swirling last week about the health of Austin-based writer Dagoberto Gilb. A family representative put the rumors to rest with this statement released today:
"Dagoberto Gilb had a minor stroke on April 29. He is grateful for everybody’s concern and well wishes, and is now privately recuperating in rehab. He will be released within a few weeks and is looking forward to resuming writing and working."
