ShelfLife@Texas

Humanities Texas will host its annual Holiday Book Fair in Austin at the historic Byrne-Reed House, 1410 Rio Grande on Saturday, December 8, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Noteworthy authors, including H.W. Brands, Jan Reid, Sarah Bird, John Spong, Mark Updegrove, David Dettmer, Katherine Catmull, Paul Woodruff, George Bristol, Jacqueline Kelly, Gilbert Garcia, Shana Burg, Peter LaSalle, Sarah Cortez, Martha Braniff, Diana Untermeyer, John Kerr, Jenna McEachern, Arturo Madrid, David Bush and Jim Parsons, will visit with holiday shoppers and sign copies…

The 2012-13 Texas Institute for Literary & Textual Studies (TILTS) symposia on the “Fate of the Book” will host a conversation with novelist Paul La Farge about how the Internet can expand the formal possibilities for fiction and engage new readership. La Farge is the author of “The Artist of the Missing,” “Haussmann, or the Distinction,” “The Facts of Winter” (under the pseudonym Paul Poissel); and the hypertext fiction, “Luminous Airplanes.”

Co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Harry…

Harvard University professor and award-winning author, Elaine Scarry, will share insight into how society thinks and talks about beauty and social justice at an event hosted by the Humanities Institute. The talk will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 7 p.m. in ACES, AVAYA amphitheater, room 2.302.

In her book, “On Beauty and Being Just,” (Princeton University Press, 2001) Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater…

Posted by Molly Wahlberg, College of Liberal Arts

“Extrañeza, Extranjería, Migración / Estrangement, Foreignness, Migration,” a graduate seminar in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese that convened between Sept. 25 and Nov. 9, recently coordinated with the department’s annual poetry event “Poéticas para el Siglo XXI / Poetics for the 21st Century.” The centralizing theme for both the seminar and the event, which took place on Oct. 27 and was free and open to the public, was the ways in which…

Attorney General Clark and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967.

Ramsey Clark (Plan II, ‘49), who served as attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson, will present a talk titled “From Civil Rights to Human Rights” on Monday, Nov. 12, from noon to 1 p.m. in the Law School’s Eidman Courtroom. The event is free and open to the public.

William Ramsey Clark was appointed assistant attorney general of the Lands Division by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, when Clark…

With the presidential debates complete and the upcoming election only a day away, many voters still remain uncertain about whom to vote for.

ShelfLife@Texas’ political round-up offers shrewd governmental, political and historical insight on the current affairs, both domestic and international, that these candidates can expect to face as President of the United States of America. Topics range from presidential leadership in divisive times to the controversial topic of nation building to the development of a “presidential accountability system.”

“Liberty’s Surest Guardian:…

In “Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity,” (The Johns Hopkins University Press, August 2012) Janine Barchas, associate professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, boldly asserts that Jane Austen’s novels allude to real names of glamorous people and places.

The first scholar to conduct extensive research into the names and locations in Austen’s fiction, Barachas offers scholars and ardent fans of Jane Austen a wealth of historical facts, while shedding an interpretive light on…

Peter LaSalle uses a single book-length sentence in his new novel, “Mariposa’s Song,” to tell of a twenty-year-old Honduran woman in the United States without documentation.  Mariposa is working as a B-girl and taxi dancer in a scruffy East Austin nightclub called El Pájaro Verde in 2005, and her story takes readers into the shadowy world that undocumented workers are too often forced to live in due to current immigration laws.

“‘Mariposa’s Song’ is a tragedy that rings distressingly true to the bone,”…

Denis Johnson, the legendary author of “Jesus’ Son, Tree of Smoke,” and “Train Dreams” and a frequent visitor to UT’s Michener Center for Writers, returns to campus on Thursday, Oct. 25, 2012 to give a free public reading at 7:30 p.m. in the Blanton Museum Auditorium.

Johnson has been a literary phenomenon since publication of his first poetry collection, “The Man Among the Seals,” at age 19. He grew up abroad and in suburban Washington, D.C., the son of a State Department official, and earned…

James Pennebaker, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, won the $10,000 grand prize at the Hamilton Book Awards for his book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us” (Bloomsbury Press , 2011) on Tuesday, Oct. 16 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin.

The awards are the highest honor of literary achievement given to published authors at The University of Texas at Austin. They are sponsored by the University Co-operative Society.

In “The Secret Life of…