This week it's a family affair on The Austin Chronicle Show as Arts Culture Robert Faires and daughter Rosalind Faires, one of the Chronicle's regular Books critics, take on the Texas Book Festival.

When glancing over the list of this year’s Texas Book Festival authors, a jarring and piercingly relevant theme stands out: what it means to live in the melting pot of American culture as a minority. What is it to be accepted and embraced in American society, and how influential is the fear that accompanies the search for that feeling of belonging?

Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 BCE said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Glenn Ganges, the river-named protagonist of many of Kevin Huizenga’s graphic novels steps again and again into the river of time and sleeps (or tries in vain to sleep) through the river of dreams.

It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to grow up in something other than a wantonly industrialized nation that’s rapidly becoming a police state? It’d be a fine, true, life-enriching thing, and it’s easier to imagine it now because we’re still nearer to the beginning of the militarizing process than are the people in Eleanor Davis’ The Hard Tomorrow.

If you’re at all into comics – at least, comics that depict other than the antics of Spandex-clad superbeings slugging the shit out of each other in the name of justice or whatever – then just the headline above will have you twitching with anticipatory glee.

In any other climate, it might feel too late in the year to immerse yourself in Mostly Dead Things. So much of the texture of Kristen Arnett’s debut novel has to do with the singular pleasures and discomforts of sweltering summer living: battling mosquitoes, picking at the label on a clammy beer bottle, feeling your shorts ride high in the humidity.

For her debut novel Marilou Is Everywhere, Sarah Elaine Smith has crafted a compelling missing girl mystery and delicately nudged it to the corner of the frame to focus instead on a girl left behind, a girl who will eventually disappear from her own life.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but perhaps the title is a gauge. The title of Saeed Jones’ new memoir How We Fight For Our Lives is a promise, or so it seems, of how we might hope to overcome life’s sufferings.

All science fiction is really about the present.
Austin-based science fiction authors Chris Brown and Nicky Drayden will both tell you that.