“Bad Boy Novelist” Larry Brown his own self will be coming to town under the auspices of the Michener Center on February 24, 7:30pm, in the fourth floor auditorium of the HRC on the UT campus, 21st & Guadalupe. When Vanity Fair decided Brown was a bad boy, the nickname stuck. His sixth work of fiction, Fay, will be out from Algonquin in March. His reading is open and free to the public… Poet Lucille Clifton will be at St. Edward’s on Thursday, February 17, at 8pm in the Jones Auditorium of the Ragsdale Cener as part of the university’s School of Humanities Visiting Writers Series. Clifton is a former poet laureate of Maryland and has received the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Lannan Achievement Award, and has been selected as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. She has published 10 collections of poetry, one autobiographical work of prose, and 19 children’s books… David Lida, author of Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico, will be at BookPeople Wednesday, February 16, at 7pm… And novelist Tony Cohan (Canary) will be at Barnes & Noble Arboretum on Wednesday, February 16, at 7:30pm to read from his new book On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel… Neal Barrett Jr. will be at Adventures in Crime and Space on Saturday, February 12, to sign his new collection of short stories, Perpetuity Blues and Other Stories, from noon-2pm. Bad boy Jesse Sublett will give a reading at the store at 1pm that day as well. And as if that isn’t enough, Don Webb will be at Adventures in Crime and Space from 3-5pm the same day to read from two new works that have been turned in to publishers but won’t be out until this fall, Souvenirs From a Damnation and Endless Honeymoon… The Austin Book Workers host a free presentation given by conservators from the HRC on how best to preserve photo albums from the 19th century. The free event begins at 7pm at All Saint’s Episcopal Church, Kinsolving Hall (27th & Whitis)… Well gaawwwllly — a press release from the Library of Congress says there’s now an Arkansas Center for the Book in Little Rock but they don’t provide any examples of Arkansas books… SWT prof Debra Monroe‘s Newfangled is finally out in paperback as is the University of Houston’s Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni‘s Sister of My Heart… The HRC recently acquired the archives of British playwright Arnold Wesker, strengthening even further their collection of 20th-century British playwrights (they also have Tom Stoppard, John Osborne, David Hare, and George Bernard Shaw)… Nobody knows how to fight about literature quite like the British (see http://www.wesker.demon.co.uk/nunn/ for an example from Wesker). Up for the Whitbread Book of the Year were Seamus Heaney‘s new translation of Beowulf and J.K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Beowulf won out. “‘If Harry Potter had won the Whitbread Book of the Year, it would have been sending out a signal to the world that Britain is a country that just can’t grow up,'” Anthony Holden, one of nine judges who voted 5-4 in favor of Heaney, told PW Daily. A.N. Wilson, another judge, told the Sunday Telegraph that giving the Whitbread to Rowling “‘would have demonstrated the cheering fact that in an age of videos and computer games, there are still tens of thousands of children who still enjoy reading books. This is much more interesting than the fact that there are four or five Whitbread judges who are so uncertain of their own judgment that they want to be thought highbrow, and therefore give a prize to an Anglo-Saxon dunderhead rendered into Irish blarney.'”
This article appears in February 11 • 2000.