Book Fest!

Boston book fest is this weekend! Extra Credit! Culture Vulture! Books!

http://www.bostonbookfest.org/2011_schedule/

Here are some highlights:

Funny Kids' Fiction 12:45pm BPL Rabb Lecture Hall

A versatile artist, Julia Alvarez has written several books for children, including The Secret Footprints and How Tía Lola Came to Visit Stay, as well as a novel for young adults, Before We Were Free. Alvarez is best known for her debut novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, and her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies. She also writes essays and poetry. Born in New York City, Alvarez was raised in the Dominican Republic. Her newest book is How Tía Lola Ended Up Starting Over.

Graphic Novels: Drawing the Story 2:30pm Trinity Church Sanctuary

Daniel Clowes is a cartoonist and author who has contributed numerous covers to The New Yorker and whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, GQ, and many other publications. He created the comic-book series Eightball, which ran for 23 issues and earned the artist a large following and multiple industry awards, including several Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards. The film adaptation of Clowes's graphic novel Ghost World, based on a script by Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff, was released to great acclaim, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and winning the Independent Spirit award, among others. He also created the widely acclaimed graphic novel Wilson, which NPR likened to "reading a series of Bazooka Joe comics written by Jean-Paul Sartre." His serialized comic for the New York Times Magazine, titled Mister Wonderful, was recently collected in an expanded hardcover edition. His newest graphic novel is The Death-Ray.

Fiction: Truth and Consequences 2:30pm BPL Rabb Lecture Hall

Ha Jin’s first full-length novel, Waiting, won the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction. His novel War Trash won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of The Bridegroom, Under The Red Flag, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award. He has received three Pushcart Prizes for fiction and a Kenyon Review Prize. Many of Jin's short stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies, as well as the Norton Introduction to Fiction and Norton Introduction to Literature. His newest novel is Nanjing Requiem, which Publishers Weekly calls "a convincing, harrowing portrait of heroism in the face of brutality." 

Far Out Fiction 4:30pm Trinity Church Sanctuary

Chuck Klosterman is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including Eating the Dinosaur; Downtown Owl; Chuck Klosterman IV; Killing Yourself to Live; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; and Fargo Rock City, which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. The Wall Street Journal has called his essays "relentlessly thoughtful." Klosterman has written for GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Spin, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Believer, A.V. Club, and ESPN. His latest is The Visible Man, a novel that deals with many of Klosterman's usual concerns: pop culture, the influence of media, voyeurism, and "reality."