Let’s run some numbers. The Twelve, Houston author Justin Cronin’s sequel to 2010’s bestselling end-times epic The Passage, comes out on Oct. 16 and runs 592 pages long. According to our calculations, you’re going to want to read no more and no less than 53.8 pages a day in order to savor the book as long as possible while still knocking it out by the time Cronin does a victory lap at the Texas Book Festival … Oh, who are we kidding? You’re gonna binge-read it like the rest of us.
Cronin’s not the only fiction writer with a buzzy new release coming to the 2012 Texas Book Festival, which runs Oct. 26-27 at the Texas Capitol. The lineup also includes Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz, whose collection of love-struck linked stories, This Is How You Lose Her, was released Sept. 11; YA rock star David Levithan (Every Day); and Jami Attenberg, whose novel The Middlesteins turned heads at last June’s BookExpo America.
Election years tend to see an uptick in political tomes: This year, Jodi Kantor gets to know The Obamas and high court chronicler Jeffrey Toobin will rep his latest, The Oath: The Obama White House vs. the Supreme Court, while Ted Widmer turns up the volume on Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy, and Robert Caro returns to chat up The Passage of Power, the latest installment in his monumental undertaking, the LBJ life story.
Other biographers include Naomi Wolf (Vagina), D.T. Max, whose Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is the first book-length profile of the late David Foster Wallace; Jan Reid (Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards); and Joe Nick Patoski (The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America). On the autobiographical front, memoirists include Cheryl Strayed, author of this summer’s breakout hit Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail; Damien Echols, who writes about his years of wrongful imprisonment as a member of the West Memphis Three in Life After Death; Dan Rather (Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News); and comedian Chris Elliott (The Guy Under the Sheets).
That’s just a small sampling from the hundreds of authors appearing at this year’s festival. You can find the entire slate online at austinchronicle.com/blogs/books, as well as links to our coverage so far of TBF authors like Andrew Porter, W.K. Stratton, Gustavo Arellano, and Helen Knode.
This article appears in September 14 • 2012.
