Pam Houston in Austin
Pam Houston fans — and there are a lot of Pam Houston fans — can rejoice: The adventuress and author of Cowboys Are My Weakness: Stories, Waltzing the Cat, and most recently, A Little More About Me, will be in town under the auspices of the Michener Center for Writers next Thursday, November 18 at 7:30pm in the fourth floor auditorium of the HRC (21st & Guadalupe). Pam Houston seems to find adventure everywhere; her latest book takes readers across five continents, though the author doesn’t always travel far for titillation. “I thought briefly about the part of the world I was in,” she writes of the American West in “Cataract,” one of the stories from Waltzing the Cat, “a place so far away from the city that the danger curve had bottomed out and started to rise again, a place where raping a woman and cutting her up into little pieces could be seen either as violence or religion, depending upon your point of view.” Houston has said that she makes “no secret about the fact that my fiction begins in autobiography,” so her reading, open and free to the public, should be more, um, adventurous than most.
Farewell, Desert Books; Congrats, AICAS
Desert Books, the little bookstore that used to be housed in the basement of Bank One on the Drag, has closed. If you had no idea Desert Books was in existence, that’s probably because its owner, longtime Austin bookseller Lynn Bender, knew his clientele of academics, and, more recently, computer book buyers, so well that he was able to cater to them to the exclusion of others and get by. Bender says he is “moving on”… Adventures in Crime and Space begins celebrating its fifth anniversary this month with author James Morrow, whose third installment in his Godhead Trilogy, The Eternal Footman, is just out. This should make for another adventurous reading: The author’s note in The Eternal Footman states that “Besides writing, [Morrow] plays with Lionel electric trains and collects videocassettes of vulgar biblical spectacles.” He’ll be at the store on Friday, November 19 from 6-8pm. Then on November 20, Austin author Charles Meyer will be signing his new mystery, Death Angel, from 3:30-5pm, and Michael Moorcock will stop by the store for a signing from 5:30-7pm.
Chicano/Latina Poetry Power Pack
Red Salmon Arts presents the Chicano/Latina Poetry Power Pack, an event at Resistencia Bookstore (603 W. Live Oak) on Saturday, November 13 from 5:30-10pm featuring some of the most dynamic voices from throughout the state. The poets scheduled to appear include Corrie Sublett-Berrios, Xavier Garza, Tammy Gomez, David Rice, and Abel Salas, among others.
This article appears in November 12 • 1999.