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Bookending BookPeople's "Independents Week" to celebrate the Austin Independent Business Alliance are a porn star with a memoir and a rising star with a first fiction starring a lovelorn pornographer. In between are a young-adult-horror star who has parlayed his success into an adult-horror diversion and a Sea World attraction, of all things; a playwriting (and Pulitzer-winning) star who has parlayed her success into an instantly important debut novel; a self-made "new fiction" star who has parlayed his success into a publishing force; and a young, formidable, cosmopolitan, um, British star who has parlayed her success into hot-commodified blurbing, hip-lit cameo-making, and a second novel whose lukewarm reviews mysteriously evaporated or warmed up by the end of 2002 as if offed or leaned on by some Random House heavy. I'm reversedly, respectively referring to Zadie Smith (Thursday, July 17, 7pm), Dave Eggers (with Smith), Suzan-Lori Parks (Wednesday, July 16, 7pm; see our review of Getting Mother's Body), R.L. Stine (Tuesday, July 15, 7pm), Andrew Lewis Conn (Friday, July 18, 7pm), and Traci Lords (Sunday, July 13, 7pm, and signing ONLY her new book, Underneath It All, as opposed to your recently acquired DVD of New Wave Hookers). All of this plus a special installment of Spike Gillespie's "Use Your Words" on Monday, July 14, at 7pm, and Thursday in-stores at Waterloo including Heybale! (6pm), Sara Hickman (8:30pm), and Erik and the She-Wolves (9pm). You're an ungrateful wretch if you miss Parks, who's a legit American light, and you'd do well to look in on Conn, whose P (Soft Skull Press, $15) Joyces its way around the streets of New York City with a calculated, empathic abandon, stopping only to showcase the young writer's 21st-century-appropriate narrative versatility and his watchmaker's way with the English language. A favorite of mine so far this year, just in case you care... Austin's Bookslut.com -- which will soon be Chicago's Bookslut.com when lovable prickly pear Jessa Crispin moves there in August but in any case is really everyone's Bookslut.com since it's on the World Wide Web -- was recently proclaimed by Time magazine as one of the top 50 Web sites in the land, under the category "Entertainment" and alongside the likes of Whitney.org, Cartoonbank.com, and RottenTomatoes.com (www.time.com/time/techtime/ 200306/entertainment.html). "This monthly 'zine digs in with smart book reviews and commentary," Maryann Murray Buechner writes, "plus a highly readable blog that will keep you in the literary loop." I disagree with the "highly readable" bit because I'm illiterate, but still... Congratulations also to UT Press, which waxed the floor with the publishing world's tail at the Mexican Cultural Institute's Latino Book Awards in Los Angeles. Six UT Press releases were recognized, notably Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo with photographs by Josephine Sacabo and translation by Margaret Sayers Peden (first place, "Arts"), Alejandro Murguía's The Medicine of Memory (first place, "Biography"), and Brown Tide Rising by Otto Santa Ana (second place, "History")... Recommended event of the week (non-BookPeople bonus edition): Kikapua-Comanche-Mexican Indian author and syndicated "Column of the Americas" scribe Patrisia Gonzales' discussion and signing of The Mud People: Chronicles, Testimonios & Remembrances (Chusma House, $19.95) at Resistencia (1801-A S. First, 416-8885).