The streets of Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, are lined with emblazoned white tents and avid bookworms carrying BookPeople book bags as they walk through the streets. It is Saturday, November 16th, day one of the Texas Book Festival. Since 1996, the Texas Book Festival has been connecting avid readers with authors, promoting literacy, and funding public libraries. The book festival also has a strong relationship with BookPeople, the Austin-based largest of indie bookstore in the state.
This year, the festival’s lineup included an all-star roundup of celebrity authors. Malcolm Gladwell spoke to a sold-out crowd at the First Baptist Church, promoting his new book Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. Hollywood star and Austin icon Matthew McConaughey spoke with his frequent collaborator, Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater, at the First Baptist Church to discuss McConaughey’s 2020 biography, Greenlights. The festival also held a litany of panels with esteemed authors. Revolution, Revenge, and Redemption: Epic Stories Inspired by Personal Histories hosted Elizabeth Gonzalez James, the author of The Bullet Swallower, and Alejandro Puyano, the author of Freedom is a Feast. The Bullet Swallower was described by James during the panel as Lonesome Dove meets One Hundred Years of Solitude. Freedom is a Feast is a decades-spanning chronicle of a family set during the historical backdrop of political turbulence in Venezuela. Gonzalez recalls her inspiration for the book, a personal family story’ Gonzalez’s great-great-grandfather, she recalls during the panel, was a bandit on the Texas-Mexico border. He was shot in the face during a confrontation with the Texas Rangers and miraculously survived. For that, he earned the nickname “The Bullet Swallower,” hence the book’s title.
Puyano, on the other hand, has a more recent inspiration; he recalls a terrifying incident that happened to his brother. While living in Venezuela, Puyano’s brother was kidnapped. Over time, his brother bonded with his captor, who at one point confessed that he had never committed a crime of this caliber. That experience and exercise in humanity inspired Puyano to write Freedom is a Feast.
“The book is around because my brother, about twelve years ago, was kidnapped in Venezuela—it was kind of terrifying—but my brother’s fine. He might be here. But the story of my brother’s kidnapping is interesting. He actually forged a pretty intense bond with one of his captors, and one of them talked with my brother for a long time. He admitted he had never done anything like this, and the conversation between my brother and the kidnapper stayed with me for obvious reasons, and I started to write a scene about my brother’s kidnapping from the point of view of my brother’s kidnapper.” This evolved into Freedom is a Feast, a sweeping saga correlated to Venezuela’s history of leftism.
In The End of The World as We Know It: Dystopian Debut Novels, authors Scott Guild and Frankie Barnett discuss the pitfalls of writing dystopia in the face of an ever-changing future. Guild arrives promoting Plastic, a dystopian dark comedy set in a world made up of plastic figurines. Climate change and eco-terrorism ravage this world, and the book follows the blossoming romance between Erin and Jacob as they try to survive an increasingly chaotic and brutal world. Frankie Barnett’s Mood Swings, like Plastic, is a dystopian dark comedy, but it takes a different approach. In Mood Swings, the state of the world has declined so rapidly and severely that all animals have been forcibly put down. It’s in that context that young Instagram poet Jenlena enters an affair with the eccentric Roderick Maeve, a billionaire oligarch who is working on a time machine to save the state of the world. Both authors discuss how they use their books to buck expected narrative trends. In Plastic, the narrative is interspersed with a fictional, in-universe television program known as Nuclear Family. Mood Swings is interspersed with in-universe tweets, Instagram posts, and, as author Frankie Barnett tells the crowd with a laugh, a picture of Texas State Senator Ted Cruz.
“It was originally a novel,” Barnett recalls, “about a young woman who has an affair with Steve Jobs.” Yet throughout the process the book evolved and changed to be more of a traditional dystopian novel. “It was a way of exploring issues that I was interested in exploring—environmentalism, tech, oligarchs, cancel culture—I don’t usually want to write from one perspective because that way it would resemble my own perspective, and I don’t think my own perspective is especially interesting.’” This idea of tech is a throughline that unites Guild and Barnett’s work. Guild adds, “We live in such a space of fragmentation that the goal for these tech companies is seamless fragmentation.” The two authors spent the afternoon discussing the prevalence of their work in an age ever driven by tech and oligarchies.
It is an especially unique festival this year. As a Banned Books panelist notes, book bans have risen exponentially recently, including in Texas. As book bans have surged nearly 200% across the past year, there is something of an act of resistance in holding a festival like this. Perhaps it is this pluckiness, this counterculture spirit, that still keeps Austin weird.