All Lit Up

Previewing the 10th Texas Book Festival

Go to the Capitol this weekend. Amble around Congress Avenue. Step inside the Paramount or Mexic-Arte. You'll find almost 200 authors of both overwhelming and obscure stature, kids going crazy over Lemony Snicket or Turtleback Theatre, chefs like Ted Allen and Jeff Blank conducting demonstrations. You'll find the Soul Stirrers wailing out gospel on the steps, and the words of local poets reverberating off of the pavement. You'll find President Clinton. You'll find Eli Wallach. You'll find Chris Elliott. You'll find a few more famous people who have taken up writing for a particularly lucrative hobby. You'll find people discussing sex, drugs, and rock & roll, but you'll also find them discussing Hurricane Katrina, education, civil rights, U.S.-Mexico relations, Iraq. The past, present, and future, basically. Pretty much everything. You'll find a whole lot of people like and unlike you celebrating books, everybody coming together for the most ambitious and varied Texas Book Festival yet.

Whereas in years past we've printed the full TBF schedule, we're leaving it to you this time around to find it on your own. If you go where I've instructed you to this weekend, you will, as it will be distributed there. You can also find it at www.texasbookfestival.org, which will provide many more logistical details on how to take full advantage of this year's events, most of which offer free admission. This is exciting news for people who love books but who are also a little broke. It's exciting for many reasons, in fact, one being that people who love books but who are also a little broke tend to utilize libraries. Well, Texas libraries receive the majority of proceeds from the festival (book sales, souvenirs, special events, etc.) in the form of grants. We're talking about more than a million dollars during the past decade.

So, that's exciting. In the end, it's exciting for everyone in Austin, especially, as well as across Texas and the planet. It's culture, which is kind of an exciting phenomenon. We're excited by it, certainly, which is why you'll find what you will below. – Shawn Badgley

All Lit Up

Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

Doubleday, 336 pp., $24.95

It's unlikely that a book about the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic would be pleasant, let alone amusing, to read, but this is just that. Myla Goldberg, whose Bee Season spawned both a film and a paean by the Decemberists, here follows Lydia Wickett, née Kilkenny, a former shopgirl from South Boston whose upper-class husband, Henry, quits med school to invent the titular remedy, a sort of placebo based on the supposed inutility of medicine. When the flu epidemic hits Boston and the U.S. enters World War I, Lydia's and the city's lives are altered irrevocably. Wickett's serves an important purpose both in depicting this oft-forgotten chapter of history and subtly drawing its connections to the modern world's ills. The book is not merely historical fiction, however, as a parallel storyline chronicles in pamphlets, news clippings, and correspondence the continued popularity of the fictitious QD Soda, an offshoot of Wickett's Remedy. A third narrative is provided in commentary to the text via marginal notation whose source is too good to reveal here.

Luckily, the story itself never feels sacrificed for the sake of experimentation or historical accuracy. Lydia is a fully fleshed character, and although her notions are sometimes quaint, she is truly sympathetic and never feels like a contrived "period" creation. Wickett's manages to be melancholic but not maudlin, and genuinely funny without resorting to the gallows humor its dark period offers. The plot's twists are many, but each is gasp-making and totally unexpected, even when heralded by the third-party narrator. Goldberg has accomplished something impressive here: a work of high intellectual and artistic integrity whose reading is wholly entertaining. – Jess Sauer


Myla Goldberg, introduced by Alicia Erian, will be in the Capitol Extension Room E1.004 on Saturday, Oct. 29. 10am.

All Lit Up

The Bones

by Seth Greenland

Bloomsbury, 400 pp., $24.95

For all the failed suicide attempts, marital crackups, and squalid childhoods among its characters, you won't find a "crying on the inside" kind of clown within miles of Greenland's debut. Not that there aren't yawning chasms separating the "entertainment palatable to the viewing public" they produce from the inner lives of the stand-up comics and TV writing "shtickticians" who populate this viciously funny novel, but at the bottom of those gulfs lie desultory tire fires of anger and self-loathing that emit toxic smoke clouding anything resembling self-respect, better judgment, or the ability to act on their rage. At the center is bad-boy comic Frank Bones, armed with a selective conscience, a line in conspiracy theories, and a career-damaging enthusiasm for handguns. Vainly fending off an "edgy" sitcom gig co-starring with an animatronic walrus, Frank has arrived at a last bid for significance in a life's work patterned after the likes of Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks but which – at best – might fall a rung or two below Sam Kinison. That a spectacular flameout might be his best next move doesn't fail to cross his mind. In this L.A., where the Zapruder film gets used as a screen-saver and aspirations for artistic integrity or political action carry the same moral weight as drug addictions, the grimly pathetic details pack a punch if the human pathos lacks credibility. Like so many other Hollywood satirists, Greenland hears the siren song of Nathaniel West only to be dashed against the rocks of that brutal genius, but nevertheless makes gleefully nasty entertainment of the wreck. – Spencer Parsons

Seth Greenland will join James Hynes, Alan Zweibel, and moderator Bill Crawford on the Seriously Funny panel in Capitol Extension Room E2.016 on Saturday, Oct. 29, 11:45am.

All Lit Up

Waterloo

by Karen Olsson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 307 pp., $24

Former Texas Observer Editor Karen Olsson has written her first novel, about a fictional city called Waterloo. If you're groaning, that's a good sign, because it means you're the right combination of townie (enough to guess that Waterloo is a thinly disguised Austin) and cynic to particularly appreciate Olsson's accomplishment. Filled as it is with incisive observations on things close to Austinites' hearts (a highway that divides the city, a petition to save an old rock club, that guy at every show who's "not quite right in the head, judging by the ardor of his dancing"), Waterloo never falls back on the self-adulating bumper-sticker version of our city that plagues so many Austin-centric endeavors. As such, you need not be an Austinite at all to enjoy Olsson's debut, which stands on its own as an intriguing peek both at the inner workings of a politician's mind and at the larger civics picture – the grand scramble of politics and journalism, idealism and compromise, and how the aging of a city, as much as of its citizens, changes it all. While it ostensibly focuses on Nick Lasseter, an alt-weekly reporter who, at 32, can no longer muster his muckraking self-righteousness, Waterloo spends considerable time alternating POV chapters from a cast of characters spanning race, age, and time, reaching back to the 1950s. No one gets short shrift, not the black reporter, Andrea, from the competing daily (the Standard-American) or her father, now dead; not the liberal white congressman who hired him in the Sixties, also deceased; and not well-intentioned suburban mom and Republican congresswoman Beverly Flintic, who might be dismantling the civic accomplishments of the former two. With her clean, witty prose, Olsson has captured the spirit of a capital city, where good citizens decipher right and wrong as much at their favorite pub as on the House floor, and bad ones lurk in the shadowy corners of Applebee's, drinking way too much root beer. – Nora Ankrum

Karen Olsson will join Will Clarke, Alicia Erian, Stephen Graham Jones, and moderator Steven Saylor on the From the Ground Up: Sense of Place in Fiction panel in Capitol Extension Room E2.016 on Saturday, Oct. 29, 1pm. She will also moderate the Writing in Unreaderly Times panel in the same room on Sunday, Oct. 30, 1:45pm.

All Lit Up

Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

Random House, 416 pp., $25.95

Salman Rushdie's ninth novel, Shalimar the Clown, is a sprawling 400 pages long, spanning several continents, a few wars, and the better part of the 20th century. It also takes on most of the really pressing issues of the day: religious intolerance, global terrorism, fraying nationalism (no bird flu, strangely). The book begins with a murder and ends with the lead-up to one, and in between the story trudges along waist-deep in blood, revenge, and other literary delicacies. The book's co-protaganist Max Ophuls is late 20th-century America personified: covetous and consumptive, leaving those unfortunate souls he walks on and over with little but lingering bitterness. Enter Shalimar the Clown, bearer of that same bitterness and example par excellence of the modern terrorist: an angry young man who can hold a grudge and who seeks global restitution for his personal grievances. Terrorism is war writ small, and Shalimar the Clown tries to show the subtle connections that exist between the personal and the political – the impact world-changing events can have on individuals and how significantly those individuals can affect the world if they choose to push back. Rushdie's dabblings in magical realism and mysticism leave me cold, and his characters are too often aphoristic mouthpieces for ideas rather than living beings – he'd rather drive a point home than insinuate it – so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. But as the book travels from World War II-era France to mid-20th-century Kashmir and into the terrorist training camps of radical Islam, Rushdie captures ably the tension and fear of the age – this "time of demons" – an age where the smallest of men can have his way with the world and its billions if he's willing to sacrifice his humanity to his anger. – Josh Rosenblatt
All Lit Up

Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke

by Peter Guralnick

Little, Brown, 750 pp., $27.95

Just as Peter Guralnick's deceptively sleek epic on the birth of soul music counts 100 pages of indices, there are almost as many passages detailing yet another Sam Cooke conquest, another Cadillac presented in lieu of cold hard cash, and another one-night stand by gospel quartet standard the Soul Stirrers. In explaining why he hasn't provided source notes for his exhaustive interviews, the author's self-deprecation allows, "That might equal the length of the book itself." Of course, it was Cooke's legendary cocksmanship ("there was never any shortage of girls within easy radius of his smile") that got him killed at an airport motel in Los Angeles at the very summit of his fame in 1964. That Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke builds meticulously toward this inevitable conclusion, tracing its subject out of the church and onto the pop charts with lucid, often down-home prose, is par for the course. 1986's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom and two Elvis bibles have long since crowned Guralnick one of the finest music historians on the dig. Which is why the relatively brief, flat nature of Dream Boogie's final chapters is downright anti-climactic, as if Guralnick too is tired of the day-to-day ephemera and ready for the reader to do the math. (Daniel Wolff's acclaimed You Send Me: The Life & Times of Sam Cooke covered the terrain via 424 pages in 1995.) Nevertheless, Guralnick triumphs in his thorough, 11th-hour preservation of a crooner whose voice did indeed make ours an often "Wonderful World." – Raoul Hernandez

Peter Guralnick, introduced by Robert Wilonsky, will be in the House Chamber on Saturday, Oct. 29, 3:45pm.

All Lit Up

Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town

by Nate Blakeslee

PublicAffairs, 450 pp., $26.95

It's been just more than five years since Texas Observer Editor Nate Blakeslee broke the now infamous story of the Tulia drug sting, in which 41 residents of the tiny Panhandle town of just over 5,000 were busted for dealing powdered cocaine to undercover cop Tom Coleman. Moreover, 35 of the defendants were black – meaning that fully 10% of the town's black population had been busted in the one sting. It didn't take long for Blakeslee's story to catch the attention of the national media and to turn the heat up in Tulia. For three years, the story continued to evolve and to repulse. The defendants, some of whom received mind-boggling prison terms (20, 30, and even 361 years in prison for their alleged crimes), were convicted solely on the testimony of Coleman, a so-called "gypsy" cop with a shockingly troubled past marked by racism, violence, and pathological deceit. Although the truth finally prevailed and the Tulia defendants were exonerated, it would be a mistake to conclude, based on years of segmented news accounts, that their victory means that Texas' criminal justice system worked well, or even efficiently. Indeed, it is through the well-crafted narrative of Blakeslee's new book that the darker and far more disturbing truth of the system is revealed. Blakeslee lays plain the failure of the so-called War on Drugs – a money-making business that requires human fuel to sustain itself, grinding forward without oversight or accountability – the reality of deep-seated rural racism, and the scourge of poverty and hopelessness. Ultimately, Blakeslee's book is a cautionary tale; a fine example of true-crime reportage crafted of practical prose, reminding us that in the absence of practical solutions to our social ills, the tragedy in Tulia will never be considered a mere aberration. – Jordan Smith

Nate Blakeslee's conversation with Wade Goodwyn takes place in Capitol Extension Room E2.010 on Sunday, Oct. 30, 1:45pm.

All Lit Up

A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior

by Charles Bowden

Harcourt, 320 pp., $24

In his second, semifictionalized book on the drug war, Charles Bowden follows undercover narcotics agent Joey O'Shay. O'Shay is a pseudonym, of course, as are all the character names. "Nothing has been fabricated," Bowden writes. "The deals occurred. As did the killings, beatings, shootings, tortures, betrayals, suicide and love." After this vow, he uses a distinctly gauzy lens to seduce readers into the intoxicating netherworld driven by brutality, sex, and greed, a hollow world that belies the surface gleam of life played hard and fast on the edge. In Bowden's effort to craft this world, his writing frequently lapses into serrated-edged Haikus, inducing a catatonic response that rivals boredom. It's not just the writing. Joey O'Shay is ultimately hollow himself, damaged, it seems, by his immersion in this world, but also by his own obsession with making the big deal. In this book, O'Shay is negotiating a multinational deal that would be his pièce de résistance. However, the deal loses its drive with frequent internal monologues presumably meant to make O'Shay endearing: remembrances of happier times, defining experiences as a young cop, and O'Shay's secret hobby painting landscapes and nursing wounded wildlife. In his postscript, Bowden addresses the code of conduct writing about cops; the earlier reference to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning; and finally, an afternoon spent with O'Shay, witnessing his arrival at a place of understanding, declaring, "This is what this book is about." Deriving this from the text, not the afterword, is preferable. – Belinda Acosta

Charles Bowden joins Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Cecilia Balli, Joaquin Jackson, Don Henry Ford, Luis Alberto Urrea, and moderator Robert Rivard on the River of Violence: Death & Drugs on the Border panel in the House Chamber on Sunday, Oct. 30, 1:45pm.

All Lit Up

Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times

edited by Kevin Smokler

Basic Books, 264 pp., $14.95 (paper)

In 2004, the NEA released a study citing a dramatic decline across the country in "literary reading." Lamenting a "vast cultural impoverishment," the study implies that "television, video games, and online media" are to blame. Kevin Smokler disagrees. "I've seen Oprah spar with Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers turn traditional publishing on its head," he writes. "I've seen This American Life do for books what The Daily Show has done for politics, spoken word poets appear on HBO alongside Sex and the City, and authors in their sixties and seventies get turned on to blogging." The talent pooled in Bookmark Now make a convincing case that those media taking the heat for dumbing us down are becoming an integral part of the literary culture rather than its arch-nemesis. From Glen David Gold's essay on Googling himself to Tom Bissell's ode to John Updike and Space Invaders, from Pamela Ribon's and Neal Pollack's chronicles of careers made online to Adam Johnson's essay on collaborative writing, there's no question that writers aren't just sprouting up through the cracks of our saturated and hardened media-scape, but are, in fact, thriving on it. And somewhere between Christian Bauman's essay on reading in the army ("I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly what I did in the war ... but I can still tell you what I read there") and Meghan Daum's treatise on hipster-/NPR-speak ("Down talk somehow manages to undermine genuine irony by letting voice modulation steal the show"), you find yourself not only believing that literature is here to stay but particularly disdainful of reading boring old studies. – Nora Ankrum

Kevin Smokler joins K.M. Soehnlein, Alexander Parsons, Justin Cronin, Craig Clevenger, and moderator Karen Olsson on the Writing in Unreaderly Times panel in Capitol Extension Room E2.016 on Sunday, Oct. 30, 1:45pm.

All Lit Up

The Hounds of Winter

by James Magnuson

University of Texas Press, 273 pp., $21.95

About as interesting as a contemporary mystery can get, the Michener Center director's sixth novel tells two wholly satisfying stories: that of an innocent man on the lam and that of the small Wisconsin town whose environs he's hiding among after a lifetime spent hiding from them. At The Hounds of Winter's outset, David Neisen's 22-year-old daughter, Maya, an intern whose work studying endangered wolves has led to an endangering streak of activism, is murdered as she preps the family cabin for her father's visit from New York. By its conclusion, one wonders if the Chamber of Commerce of the otherwise sleepy, snowy Black Hawk – portrayed as hopelessly beset by scandal and conspiracy, its elders often way too big for their britches – might consider issuing an order on the author's head. Neisen, who discovers his daughter's body in a wrenching, realistic scene, is convinced that he will serve as the local authorities' primary suspect for one reason: Forty years before, he was with his friend Andy Danacek when the kid took a dare and ended up drowning. Struck dumb by the tragedy, young Neisen's silence was mistaken by some for guilt, and, before his family was forced to relocate, Andy's brother vowed revenge. Well, now, the brother, Doug, is sheriff, and it's payback time, apparently.

This notion, of course, is pretty ridiculous (or is it?), and one of the many reasons Magnuson succeeds here. Hints regarding his well-drawn hero's mental stability are offered throughout the alternately understated and supercharged narrrative: He is scarred, secretive, and as close to being as crazy as we all are. All it takes in this case is his only child's death. Still, if he doesn't run, he's not a fugitive. If he's not a fugitive, we don't get to see a fine writer strut his considerable stuff in an enduring, if not conventional, plot construct. But the construct isn't the point. The point is using the construct to write a novel worth reading. It's not that the reader takes away all that much from The Hounds of Winter – its circumstances at times are as unlikely as a campfire tale's, its impact almost as fleeting – it's that The Hounds of Winter takes the reader away for well-spent hours. – Shawn Badgley


James Magnuson joins Tom Zigal, Steven Saylor, Mark Gimenez, and moderator Jesse Sublett on the On Edge: Literary Thrillers panel in Capitol Extension Room E2.026 on Sunday, Oct. 30, 3pm.

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