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By the books: two new tomes to whet your traveler's appetite for adventure

The Summer Reading Menu

Austin literary agent Jim Hornfischer hasn't been sleeping. He's taking the bar at the end of the month, he and his wife have three children, and he recently founded his own agency, Hornfischer Literary Management, Inc., after eight years with The Literary Group, an agency headquartered in New York known for handling celebrity books.

Should authors really worry if publishers are reporting a rise in the number of unsold books being returned to them from bookstores?

What will shy novelist Sarah Bird do now that she's back in the limelight, Dick Holland asks in this profile of the author of The Yokota Officers Club.

How to celebrate Bloomsday and other upcoming literary events in Austin.

"When I was talking to my wife about coming to speak at the conference I told her that I expected to be pelted with rotten tomatoes," environmental journalist Michael Pollan said at the opening session of the Organic Trade Association's (OTA) first annual All Things Organic Conference & Trade Show, held in Austin last week. "She said, 'Well, at least they'll be really good, organic tomatoes. Hopefully, Muir Glen.'"

With the current state of the environment, long belabored by activists and scientists who point to any number of warning signs of planetary collapse, it makes sense, Chronicle contributor Dan Oko writes, that writers with deep green inclinations would juggle literary aesthetics and scientific data in their efforts to jar us from the stupefying impact of too much information and too much bad news.

If there is drama in Laura Furman's stories, Robin Bradford writes, it is not usually the life and death kind. It is the daily, wearing, ineffable drama of living as a human island among others who invariably seem more attractive, more connected, or simply more "normal."

What's a successful writer like Dagoberto Gilb got against the establishment?

In Search of the McSweeney's Ethos

Dick Holland assesses two Texas journalists, Gary Cartwright and Jan Reid, whose new collections of articles possess a cautionary wisdom, the kind you acquire when you court danger and danger provides you with a keen view of what lies beyond.

How to learn more about publishing, for free; and upcoming literary events in Austin.

Too-often regarded as dull compilations of dusty facts, biographies are rarely bestsellers, Amanda Eyre Ward writes. But Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire reads like a racy novel, complete with enough rocky relationships, torrid trysts, and illegitimate childbirths to keep Jerry Springer in business for weeks.

Upcoming literary events in Austin.

Neal Barrett Jr. and Bill Crawford both win the Busiest Texas Writer of 2000 Award.

Based on her physical appearance alone, Jean Stapleton is a natural to portray Eleanor. But it turns out that the accomplished actress' resemblance to the first lady doesn't end there. It extends to her idealism, her feminism, and even her awakening to activism.

A new documentary on IFC examines seminal horror films of the Sixties and Seventies and persuasively argues that the images and ideology of these groundbreaking films were influenced by the mood of the times.

Book news, signings, and author appearances this week.

For umpty-some years now Joe Lansdale has been terrorizing the book world with radically weird, unsettlingly violent, and often indefinable short stories, novellas, and novels. What happens when he veers toward the mainstream?

"Good adventure books do the same thing as a good adventure," Chronicle writer Dan Oko writes in this roundup of recently published adventure books.

How to get Book Sense and why you'll be seeing lots of Texas Monthly in book form this fall.

Upcoming events in September.

Television goes back to school; Fox Family picks up Freaks and Geeks; promising TV movie Witchblade could become a series.

Larry McMurtry's New Books Continue His Journey

Larry McMurtry's New Books Continue His Journey

News on how to attend what is certain to be the dumbest book reading in Austin all year long.