More than 200 writers will showcase their books, including a host of authors from our university. Some of the presenters include:

Author: Jeffrey Abramson, professor of law and government
Book: “Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.028

Author: Oscar Casares, assistant professor of English
Book: “Amigoland”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.016

Author: Jacqueline Jones, the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor in Southern History
Book: “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol Extension Room E2.028

Author: Kate Brooks, director of Liberal Arts Career Services
Book: “You Majored in What?: Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Lifestyle Tent (10th and Congress)

Author: Lucas A. Powe, Jr., professor of law and government
Book: “The Supreme Court and the American Elite”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.016

Author: Elizabeth Engelhardt, associate professor of American Studies
Book: “Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Cooking Tent

Author: Mark Weston, UT Law alumnus (moderated by ShelfLife@Texas contributor Laura Castro)
Book: “Prophets & Princes: Saudi Arabia from Muhammad to the Present”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.014

The Texas Book Festival was founded in 1995 by former first lady Laura Bush to promote reading and honor Texas authors. Sessions are free and open to the public. Proceeds from books purchased at the festival benefit the state’s public libraries.

Visit this site for a full list of festival authors.

In his book, Bruster, professor of English, offers a series of intellectual stories examining Shakespeare’s individual words, idioms and phrases. With a particular focus on the complexities of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech, Bruster explores the myriad of questions it raises, such as knowledge and existence.

A great resource for literary scholars, actors, playgoers and readers, the book provides insight into Shakespeare’s remarkable expansion of the English language.

Bruster is the author of “Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare,” “Quoting Shakespeare,” “Shakespeare and the Question of Culture” and coauthor of “Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theater.”

Even before its official release on August 10th, Oscar Casares’ novel, “Amigoland,” is following in the footsteps of his acclaimed 2003 debut, “Brownsville.” Both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly gave the novel starred reviews, and USA Today and Time Out New York included it on their recommended summer reading lists even before it was in print. Harper’s and The Wall Street Journal, among others, have upcoming reviews and Texas Monthly has excerpted the novel in its August issue.  A state-wide tour is scheduled in bookstores, on campuses, and at literary festivals throughout the fall.

Austin’s BookPeople will host a reading by Casares and a book signing at 7 p.m., Thursday, August 13.

Casares joined fiction faculty of the Department of English and the Michener Center for Writers in 2004 after “Brownsville’s” publication to critical acclaim.  Reviewers agreed that his collected stories had captured the unique Tex Mex culture of his hometown and the ordinary joys and sorrows of his characters without reducing them to socioeconomic stereotypes or writing “message” fiction. The New York Times said “with quiet mastery of the smallest detail, Casares puts us on neighborly terms with the locals.”

“Amigoland,” set on the South Texas border with Mexico, is the story of estranged brothers Don Fidencio Rosales—querulous, nearly 92 years old, and living in a nursing home—and Don Celestino, twenty years his junior and newly widowed, who finds himself somewhat ambivalently involved with his young cleaning woman, Socorro. The housekeeper is a catalyst for the brothers reconnecting, and the improbable trio takes off on a bus trip into Mexico, where the siblings hope to settle a long-standing dispute about how their grandfather arrived in the U.S. and Socorro hopes to find clarity in her unlikely romance. The trip stirs up powerful issues of family and pride and about how we care for the people we love.

BookPeople is on the corner of West 6th Street and North Lamar Blvd.

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, a graduate of the James A. Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin, has won the 2009 Keene Prize for Literature for her play titled “Lidless,” a poetic treatment of the issue of torture at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Keene Prize is one of the world’s largest student literary prizes. Cowhig will receive $50,000 and an additional $50,000 will be divided among three finalists.

Cowhig’s play was chosen out of 58 submissions in drama, poetry and fiction. In the play, a former Guantanamo detainee dying of liver disease journeys to the home of his female interrogator to demand reparation for the damage she wreaked on his body and soul. It recreates the traumatic experience of interrogation and moves toward reconciliation between its protagonists.

Texas Ex Karen Steele (Ph.D. English, ’96) is the author of “Women, Press and Politics During the Irish Revival” (Syracuse University Press, 2007), a study of female voices who helped launch the 1916 Easter Rising, which ultimately led to Ireland’s independence from Great Britain. Steele is now an associate professor of English and director of the Women’s Studies Program at Texas Christian University.

Ellen Crowell (Ph.D. English, ’04) is the author of “The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction” (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), an interdisciplinary study of two literary traditions that have remarkable similarities. Crowell is now an assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University.

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, chair of the English department and a scholar of Irish literature, directed both Steele and Crowell during their doctoral studies at the university.

For further reading from the field of Irish studies, check out Cullingford’s books which include “Ireland’s Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture,” “Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry” and “Yeats, Ireland and Fascism.”

That’s the question students tackle in her popular course, “Literary Marriages from Hell,” which examines the lives of doomed literary couples and the masterpieces of literature they produced.

Students read books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night,” which immortalized his relationship with his wife Zelda (who suffered from schizophrenia), and analyze poems such as “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath, which portrayed her troubled relationships with both her father and British poet laureate Ted Hughes.

“Plath and Hughes are the students’ perennial favorite couple to study,” Berry says. “The volume of work that sprang from their union is simply amazing.”

Along with engaging in textual criticism, the class screens films such as “Sylvia,” the 2003 biopic of Plath’s life starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig.

“In studying the relationships that informed the authors’ creativity, students gain a deeper reading of some of the great literature of the 20th century,” Berry says. “However, it’s important to note the works stand on their own, regardless of the context of their creation.”

Ready to dive into some messy relationships, but great literature? Check out the required reading list from the course syllabus:

• “The Waste Land and Other Poems” by T.S. Eliot;
• “Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald;
• “Birthday Letters” by Ted Hughes;
• “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath;
• “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath.

An earlier version of this story first appeared in the Winter 2008-09 issue of Life & Letters, the College of Liberal Arts alumni magazine.

A playwright and novelist (”Money Mountain,” “Ghost Dancing,” “Windfall,” “Hounds of Winter”), Magnuson also has written for ABC and NBC series television.

Reading could become an occupational hazard for someone faced with plowing through 700-plus manuscripts for MFA admissions each spring, not to mention staying current on dozens of authors who visit the center annually, and the work-in-progress of his own graduate students.

Check out a few selections from Magnuson’s crowded nightstand, and what he had to say about them, after the jump.

“On Chesil Beach” (Nan Talese, 2007) by Ian McEwan

This is a writer at the top of his game. The last four or five books have been magnificent. The fumblings and misunderstandings of a repressed young couple on their wedding night could have become material for farce. In “Chesil Beach,” McEwan turns it into something both tragic and resonant.

“True History of the Kelly Gang” (Vintage, 2001) by Peter Carey, two-time Booker Award winner

Not just one of the greatest novels written without a comma, but one of the greatest novels of our time. Someone has said of Ned Kelly that he was not so much Australia’s Jesse James as he was its Thomas Jefferson. The book purports to be Kelly’s autobiography and the voice that Carey creates for his illiterate narrator is a wonder. The book reads like the wind. Charles Dickens, say hello to Cormac McCarthy.

“How Fiction Works” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) by James Wood

A small gem of a book by a leading critic on the art of fiction. I read it in a night. A couple of things I walked away with that I will now use as my own opinions: first person isn’t as different from third as you think and metaphor is always mixed; that’s the point. Wood seems to have read everything and I loved the quotes he takes from other writers.

“The Savage Detectives” (Picador, 2008) by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Who could have guessed that a slangy novel about young, pretentious avant-garde poets in Mexico City could be so moving? But Bolano captures the world of youthful artistic ambition beautifully. These teen-age poets tear into one another’s work, hit on girls, steal books, have grand thoughts, but the author makes us care for them. The book keeps opening up, turning eventually into the search for a lost surrealist poet in the Sonoran Desert. This book is able to wed the detective novel with post-modern fracturing of identities in a remarkable, mind-bending way.

Zigal is the author of the critically acclaimed Kurt Muller detective series set in Aspen, Colorado. His latest book “The White League” (Toby Press, 2005), explores a coffee magnate’s descent into the political underworld of New Orleans.

Zigal earned a bachelor’s degree in English from The University of Texas at Austin, and a master’s degree in creative writing from Stanford University.

Keep reading to find out what books have recently spent some time on his nightstand.

“The Film Club” (Twelve Books, 2008) by David Gilmour

This is a delightful memoir by a father who allows his sweet but unhappy son to drop out of high school if he agrees to watch three movies a week (of his father’s choosing) and discuss them.

My son is in college now, but there were times when I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to do something alternative to make his high school education more meaningful and rich. We watched movies, too, read books, and went on a trip to Cuba, just like Gilmour and his son.

As his son struggles with adolescence, the middle-aged Gilmour loses his job and also struggles with his own career in broadcasting and film criticism. Movies keep them talking to each other in hard times. This book is one of the nicest surprises of 2008. I liked it so much I’m going to write a fan letter to the author.

“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” (Riverhead, 2003) by ZZ Packer

When ZZ Packer was teaching at the university last fall, I met her at Julio’s, her favorite café, right before the presidential election and found her to be incredibly charming, funny, and fluent in all things political. So I bought her debut collection of short stories, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” and was delighted by her vivid language and the illuminating sensibility she brings to the African American experience in post-civil rights America.

Packer is in her mid 30s and grew up in a vastly different world than her literary predecessors, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. She is concerned with racism and sexism, of course, but as they are manifested in a more evolved society in which black women attend Yale (the title story), teach in inner city schools, and struggle to live penniless in another country; and young men are sometimes not as “politically committed” as the older civil rights generation expects them to be. Everyone who voted for Barack Obama—and everyone who didn’t—should read these engaging stories.

“Out Stealing Horses” (Picador, 2007) by Per Petterson

This novel, translated from Norwegian and the winner of numerous accolades, came highly recommended by two of my writer friends who rarely steer me astray. I was not as dazzled as they were.

“Out Stealing Horses” is the story of a man in his late 60s who returns to live in an isolated cabin in the deep woods near the Swedish border in order to spend his final years pondering his boyhood there. He ponders a lot. And walks his dog in the snow. Makes breakfast, chops wood. Ponders more, usually with a dose of self-pity and longing to understand his father.

To be fair, Petterson’s technique of weaving three different time periods (1945, 1948, and the present) is quite effective. I just wished I cared more about this solitary man and his gloomy ruminations. By the end of the book I wished I knew exactly what had happened to his father and the married World War II resistance woman who loved him. In all the Nordic darkness and wintry claustrophobia, a ray of clear narrative light would have helped.

“City of Refuge” (HarperCollins, 2008) by Tom Piazza

There have been numerous excellent nonfiction books and survival memoirs about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, but few novels (James Lee Burke’s “The Tin Roof Blowdown” comes to mind), perhaps because the unbelievable incidents that actually took place do not require fanciful acts of the imagination to explain them.

In “City of Refuge,” Piazza does an excellent job of capturing the sights and sounds of the hurricane winds and massive flooding, especially as it destroyed the Lower 9th Ward. He follows two families through their travails and subsequent relocations to Houston and Chicago.

I found the Williams family (a black family who moved to Houston), far more compelling and sympathetic than the Donadlsons (a white couple who moved to Chicago), as they bicker about whether to return and raise their children in New Orleans. The Donaldsons’ struggle comes from a place of comfort and privilege, with fallback options, whereas the dispersed Williams family members struggle to find each other and stay together, make a living, and keep the faith in a difficult new environment. Kudos to Piazza for his thoughtful depiction of one of the greatest tragedies of our time.

Great books can foster nationwide discussion or provide a framework for the way people understand an issue. And every once in a while, a book comes along that changes everything.

Last winter, College of Liberal Arts professors took readers on a literary journey through U.S. history in the feature “Books that Changed America.” The story profiled seven bestselling books that changed American hearts and minds.

Find out which books made the list after the jump. And, if you have some time during the holidays, leave a comment and tell us which books you would add to the list, and why.

The following list is excerpted from the feature story “Books that Changed America,” which appeared on the UT homepage Dec. 3, 2007.

Common Sense (1776)
By Thomas Paine

Before “Common Sense,” most Americans assumed it was their duty to obey the laws of the British Crown, but after its publication this deference suddenly seemed absurd, says Lorraine Pangle, associate professor of government, who studies early American political philosophy.

“Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil,” Paine famously stated. “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.”

Originally published in Philadelphia, the 79-page pamphlet that captured the emerging spirit of the revolution and cost only one shilling was soon republished or extracted in newspapers throughout the colonies, as well as England and Scotland.

“Paine’s polemic was the most effective piece of propaganda in American history,” says H. W. Brands, professor of history and author of “The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin.” “It provided the words for thoughts that had been rattling around the American colonies for months and years, and it propelled the American people toward independence.”

The Federalist (1788)
By Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

Seventy-seven of the 85 articles advocating the ratification of the U.S. Constitution that made up the “The Federalist” originally appeared in New York City newspapers under the pseudonym “Publius.” A two-volume compilation was published in 1788, and subsequent scholarship revealed the authors to be Alexander Hamilton (51 articles), James Madison (29 articles) and John Jay (five articles).

“Prior to the ‘Federalist Papers’ most citizens believed that any expansion of centralized governmental power would curtail liberty,” says Mark Longaker, assistant professor of rhetoric and writing and author of “Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America.

“Jay, Hamilton and Madison argued that expanding the federal government in careful ways could actually increase liberty. Since their effort, nearly every major expansion of the federal government’s size or authority—from FDR’s (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s) New Deal to George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security—has repeated this argument: more government can mean more freedom.”

Today the papers serve as an important source of interpretation of the Constitution by scholars, lawyers and judges. As of 2000, “The Federalist” was quoted 291 times in Supreme Court decisions, according to historian Ron Chernow.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)
By Frederick Douglass

One of the most influential leaders in African American history, escaped slave Frederick Douglass challenged the conscience of the American people with his autobiography that vividly described his life as a slave.

“Douglass’s narrative invigorated the abolitionist movement with an intimate and eloquent account of the physical and psychological evils of slavery and endures as one of America’s most powerful meditations on the meaning and value of freedom,” says Shirley Thompson, assistant professor of American studies, who researches narratives of slavery and freedom. “It extended an African American tradition of improvisation and self-making and remains a touchstone for African American literature and political philosophy today.”

Within three years of its publication, Douglass’s “Narrative” had sold thousands of copies and was translated into several languages. The author continued his career as a powerful anti-slavery lecturer throughout the free states and embarked on a 21-month lecture tour in England, Ireland and Scotland.

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe,” Douglass wrote.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
By Harriet Beecher Stowe

National Era, an abolitionist weekly, paid Harriet Beecher Stowe $300 for the serial rights to her novel that profoundly affected American’s attitudes toward slavery. Because of the story’s popularity, J. P. Jewett and Co. convinced Stowe to publish her serial as a book, which immediately became a must-read for concerned citizens.

In 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe, he is purported to have said, “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war.” Though scholars dispute whether this conversation ever took place, the role of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in turning public sentiment against slavery is undeniable, says Michael Winship, professor of English.

Today, the novel continues to spark discussion about race due to its stereotypical depictions of African-Americans that inspired a melodramatic theatrical tradition.

“After becoming an American classic, it came to be viewed as an embarrassment,” Winship says. “Only recently have scholars begun the task of reassessing its place in American literary culture. It remains to be seen just how it will be evaluated as we continue to struggle with our vexed history of race relations in the United States.”

The Jungle (1906)
By Upton Sinclair

Muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote the ferocious exposé, “The Jungle,” to raise awareness of the plight of immigrant factory workers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Instead, the American public was horrified at the thought of finding a finger in their sausage, says Brian Stross, professor of anthropology who researches American food cultures.

Within six months of the book’s publication, President Theodore Roosevelt began an inquiry and Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, laying the foundation for the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration.

“Long before Eric Schlosser’s ‘Fast Food Nation’ sent diners scurrying from their local McDonald’s, Sinclair was turning American stomachs and feeding a furor for reform in meat-packing plants that soon spread to other food industries,” says Michael Stoff, director of Plan II Honors and associate professor of history.

Sinclair’s book was meant to expose the horrid conditions in which immigrants worked. Instead it struck a different target. “I aimed for the public’s heart,” Sinclair later complained, “and by accident hit it in the stomach.”

Silent Spring (1962)
By Rachel Carson

After working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 17 years and learning about the abuse of pesticides, Rachel Carson wrote the environmental treatise, “Silent Spring.” She challenged the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and environmentally harmful strategies of industrial agriculture following World War II.

Originally serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, “Silent Spring” was published three months later in book form by Houghton Mifflin. The book sparked widespread concern about pollution, which led Congress to pass the Pesticide Control Act of 1972.

“‘Silent Spring’ is a testament to how conventional environmental practices and policy can change dramatically when just one person has the courage to challenge the status quo,” says Brian King, assistant professor of geography and the environment who teaches courses on conservation.

In an introduction to the 1994 edition of the book, former Vice President Al Gore called the book a “cry in the wilderness.” Without it, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never developed at all, he asserts.

“The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery—not over nature, but of ourselves,” Carson wrote, inspiring a generation of activists.

The Feminine Mystique (1963)
By Betty Friedan

“A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’ She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children,” wrote Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique,” a book credited with starting the contemporary women’s movement.

“The Feminine Mystique” contributed to big advances in women’s legal rights, such as equal economic opportunity for women, espoused in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and equal educational opportunity for women, included in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, says Gretchen Ritter, professor of government.

“Friedan eloquently articulated the sense of unease and disaffection that many women felt with the limitations imposed on them in post-war America,” Ritter explains. “Today, her work continues to inspire the next generation of women to reconsider the meaning of womanhood in American society and explore the impact that balancing work and family has on gender equality.”

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ShelfLife@Texas will be on hiatus for winter break, but check back with us in January for more book news from The University of Texas at Austin.

Who can forget Paul Newman’s brash portrayal of a Texas cowboy in “Hud”? Or James Dean’s turn as ranch hand Jett Rink in “Giant”?

Texas looms larges in moviemakers’ imaginations writes English Professor Don Graham in the pocket-sized handbook “State Fare: An Irreverent Guide to Texas Movies” (TCU Press, 2008), but they don’t always get it right.

“For all of our urban skylines and high-tech yuppiedom, we can’t shake our movie-disseminated mythology as a state of cowboys, hicks, and small-town gaucheries,” Graham lamented in the Texas Monthly article “Unreality Bites.”

Graham is the author of numerous books and articles about Texas, including “Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas” (1983) and “Lone Star Literature: From the Red River to the Rio Grande” (2003).

In “State Fare,” the Texas literature specialist provides a brief overview of some of the best (and worst) Texas films, including “Red River,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Urban Cowboy,” and “The Alamo.”

From cattle drives to oil wells, lusty schoolmarms and desperados, Hollywood has captured Texas mythology in all of its many forms.

What are some of your favorite movies about Texas?