Texas Book Festival: 5 book to know before you go

The Texas Book Festival is taking over downtown Austin this weekend. It's going to be fabulous. This is your jam. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for weeks since the lineup was out. I look forward to it all year. There are more than 280 authors and more than 200 sessions. So how do you decide who to see, when to see? I sat down with Susanna O'Brien, the festival's chief impact officer, about how to plan your weekend. Here's part of our conversation. Good morning, Susanna. Thank you so much for joining us here on Austin Live. We appreciate it. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here today. Let's talk about this year's book festival. Big picture, what are the most important things that our viewers need to know as they prepare for what is an amazing weekend of reading and communing with fellow book lovers? Sure. So on November 14th and 15th in downtown Austin in the Texas State Capitol, The streets surrounding the Capitol, so we've got 7th to 11th on Congress, Colorado, other venues including the State Theater, the Contemporary Austin Jones Center, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and other venues. We will have 285 authors. In 220 sessions with something for everyone. You've chosen five books that we want to talk about more deeply. Among them is my favorite book of the year, which is Patrick Radden Keefe's London Falling. Patrick Radden Keefe, staff writer for The New Yorker, investigative journalist who's written some incredible books, including Say Nothing and The Empire of Pain. This is just another fabulous work from him. He is just the most... Hi, I'm Patrick Radden Keefe, and I want to introduce you to my new book, London Falling. Which is a true story about a 19-year-old London boy named Zach Brettler who died under mysterious circumstances in 2019. After he died, his parents had to kind of become investigators, become detectives to figure out what had happened to him and in the process they discovered that he had lived a secret life, a double life that they didn't know about, pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. So it's a thriller. It's a mystery, it's a true story about a family trying to grapple with who their child really was in ways that they didn't understand when he was alive. We'll have his books for sale in the book people sales tent in the heart of the festival footprint and he will be signing after a session, but you'll be able to buy his books there. Okay, perfect. Tell us about the other ones that you've chosen for us today to talk about. Okay, so we've got, we've got... Kate Camillo, who is an absolute favorite of my children, and she writes middle grade chapter books, and they're so beautiful, so tender, and when you hear her speak, she really does connect you, doesn't matter how old you are, with that inner sense of wonder. So she's just a fantastic writer and an even better speaker. So if you can catch her, whether you're with children or not, I highly recommend you do so. We've got Casey Cheska's debut novel, The Fountain, which is kind of a talk everlasting for adults. Casey explores the burden of living forever in a really kind of fascinating way. We have Tom Junoz. In the days of my youth, I was told what it is to be a man. Tom writes for Esquire, GQ, ESPN, and this is the story of his larger-than-life father and a lot of family secrets. There was a moment in this book, and it was when I was really trying to find the voice for the book, where I basically had to say to myself, I loved him then. I love him. I love him now. I have to be true to that. If I'm going to be true to myself, I have to be as difficult as that is, as unworthy as my father is sometimes of that kind of loyalty. I have to be true to that. And that's the thing that I think ultimately allowed me to write the book. You know. I love everybody in it. You know, I write, I write with that. And that's, it turned out to be, you know, my secret, my secret weapon in writing the book. And then finally, I have Lisa Lee's, I'm sorry, American Han. This is a terrific, poignant novel about the Korean American immigrant experience in the Bay Area. The opportunity and really all the challenges that come with it. That it's just a very moving, novel that I loved so much. Tell me about reader types and programming and and how you were able to put that together. Well well I want to mention that something really terrific you can do with the website is that you can calendar the sessions. So you can if you have a Google or an Apple calendar you can create a whole schedule for yourself that way. But basically what we've done is we have created programming for all the different types of readers in different venues. So, as you said, if you like cookbooks, go. Go to the Central Market Cooking Tent and you will find a full weekend of programmings. If you are a news junkie, I recommend the BookSpan, the C-SPAN at BookTV 2 Tent, or on Saturday we have programming on the rooftop of the Contemporary in partnership with the Atlantic. If you like fiction, Kirkus Reviews has a great tent. We also have a ton of great sessions in the Capitol around fiction. Lovers of Texas history, Texas news, will enjoy the Texas Tent, presented by Texas Monthly. Additionally, we have... We have four tents for youth. We have a Read Me a Story tent with story times all weekend long. We have the middle grade tent called Next Chapter. We have the YAHQ. And we have the YA Meetup tent. We also have the children's activity tent. So five different programming tents for youth. We also have the Las Almás Tent with books in Spanish, half of the sessions are in Spanish. It is one of the very biggest festivals in the United States and I think the diversity of our programming is pretty impressive and yes, we work in partnership with other festivals all the time, we're in these conversations and I do think we are certainly on that map.