The Texas Book Festival had already planned for a hybrid festival this year, offering both in-person and virtual programming. But amid concerns over the Delta variant’s continued prevalence in Austin, TBF has announced in-person events will be scaled back dramatically.

As you mop July's sweat off your brow, October may feel like a lifetime away. But the Texas Book Festival has just helped shorten that time span by revealing the first authors for 2021, a stellar group that includes Colson Whitehead, Elizabeth McCracken, Amor Towles, Sandra Cisneros, and Gabriela Garcia.

Jason June is a fan of many forms of magic: the glitter of mermaid unicorns; Laura Dern’s mesmerizing turn as Dr. Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park; and, as exemplified in his newest young adult novel Jay’s Gay Agenda, the simple magic of discovering yourself as a queer person.

The Texas Book Festival survived the pandemic in 2020 with a completely virtual version that was spread across three weeks. In 2021, the festival will be back online, but only in part. Live events will make their return during a week-long celebration scheduled for Oct. 25-31.

One useful rule of thumb in politics might be: When you’re defending yourself against charges of racism, try not to engage in more of it.

UT-Austin’s athletic program is currently undergoing one of its periodic convulsions, the dismissal and replacement of 4-year football coach Tom Herman, who had failed to achieve what the alumni (more precisely, “Texas Exes”) consider the Longhorn birthright of national championships.

Screens are the default by now, of course. Which makes books more of a special thing, just on the surface.

In 2010, just before that year’s Texas Book Festival and a panel on her book, The Warmth of Other Suns, author Isabel Wilkerson told the Chronicle’s Wells Dunbar that she preferred the term “caste” in describing U.S. social structures, rather than “racism.”

Jonathan Lethem has created in The Arrest an allegorical tale full of isolation and rejuvenation fitting for 2020. It's a year that most of us, whether by choice or not, have begun to tell new stories that just might invert the status quo.