Okay, I’m kind of working the sports allusions up there, yeah – but it’s not to be helped, citizen.

Fall just got a little closer, readers, not in a meteorological sense but a literary one. The Texas Book Festival has released the full list of authors for its 2018 event, and you can look forward to more than 280 great guests to attend, among them Cecile Richards, Julián Castro, Susan Orlean, and Dessa.

Raymond Chandler, born in Chicago in 1888, raised mostly in London, fought in the trenches in World War I, dogged by failure, identity crisis, and alcoholism. Flopped as a poet and journalist. Fired from a high-paying job as an oil executive. Focus came in 1932 when he retyped a Dashiell Hammett story and studied every line, word, and nuance.

In the late 1930s, when the fangs of fascism were getting ready to gobble up Europe, America saw its destiny to be the tough guy on the international beat, and a handful of smart left-wingers created one of the most enduring literary protagonists of modern times: the hard-boiled detective.

Suspense as a genre is supposed to make you anxious, not balance you out. But these are weird times. That’s why, when the world feels like nothing but a string of Russian indictments, presidential gaffes, and natural disasters, it’s comforting to bury myself in the mysteries of Mary Higgins Clark, whose books helped introduce me to the genre as a kid.

Well, bleak me the fuck out.

 And then do it again, please, Nick Drnaso. Because even the tastiest vinegar, when a person’s finally done sipping at it, makes the next bite of plain bread – the very stuff of life, right? – makes that bread taste so goddam sweet.

On the afternoon of the last day I saw Karl Stevens alive, I used a large rock to bash out the rear valence window on the driver’s side of my Toyota Echo.

This being the Year of Black Panther hasn't escaped the notice of Austin’s African American Book Festival. With the slogan "Literary Vibranium," the 12th edition on June 23 features local comics scribe Evan Narcisse (Rise of the Black Panther) and Paul Coates, father to Black Panther writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.

It was as if a rectangle door of Exit West had opened into the Austin Central Library and migrants through time had poured into its Special Event Center for a transient moment en route to their next destination. So it felt on Wed., April 11, when Mohsin Hamid, author of the much-praised novel, arrived as a guest of the Mayor's Book Club.