The Rolling Stone Years

with Rolling Stone photographer Baron WolmanDate: Saturday, October 22, 2011Time: 3:15 - 4:00Location: The Sanctuary at First United Methodist Church (1201 Lavaca, enter from Lavaca St.)The Rolling Stone Years features the work of Baron Wolman, the first chief photographer to work for America’s legendary Rolling Stone magazine. Many of Wolman’s images from the late sixties and early seventies have become iconic shots from rock’s most fertile era. Wolman shares his insights on the world of rock, and the brilliant yet sometimes flawed characters that inhabit that world.

The Journals of Spalding Gray

with Nell Casey; this session is a collaboration with The Harry Ransom CenterDate: Saturday, October 22, 2011Time: 4:15 - 5:00Location: Capitol Auditorium Room E1.004In The Journals of Spalding Gray, Nell Casey allows us intimate access into the life of Spalding Gray, the actor/writer who invented the autobiographical monologue and perfected the form in such celebrated works as Swimming to Cambodia, before committing suicide in 2004. Culled from more than 5,000 pages and including interviews with friends, colleagues, lovers, and family Nell Casey gives us a haunting glimpse into the life of a creative genius.

Sunday

The Globalization of American Culture

with Richard Pells, moderated by Robert Abzug

Date: Sunday, October 23, 2011

Time: 12:15 - 1:00Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.014

With engaging analysis and a brisk pace, Pells' Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culturetracks the development of American modernism from its inception to the present day. He shows how modernist artists, writers, architects, and filmmakers across the world broke down the rigid traditions of the 19th century with new, shocking ways of viewing the world.

Moderator Robert H. Abzug is Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Texas, where he teaches courses in American religion and psychology, Antebellum America, the Holocaust, and American Jewish culture. He is the author of four books and, in 2012, will be publishing an edition of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience as well as the first full-length biography of the American psychologist Rollo May.

Don't Fence Me In: Genre-Bending Fiction

with Lev Grossman, Erin Morgenstern, Thomas Mullen, and Charles YuDate: Sunday, October 23, 2011Time: 12:30 - 1:30Location: House ChamberIn 2009, noted science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin took Margaret Atwood to task, believing that Atwood shunned being labeled a science fiction writer because she didn't "want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto," as Le Guin called it, the place where science fiction, zombie novels, thrillers, fantasy, and mysteries live. A place where literary fiction thrives is not, presumably, a ghetto. Or is it?A number of the 2011 Festival's literary writers (besides the ones appearing in this session) are moving outside the confines of literary fiction by crafting narratives with complex characters and lyrical language but with plots that are more accurately called science fiction, fantasy, or thrillers (check out Colson Whitehead, Russell Banks, and Hillary Jordan's novels, for starters). Join us at this session for a conversation with Lev Grossman, Erin Morgenstern, Thomas Mullen, and Charles Yu, four imaginative, restless writers whose new novels are literary fiction, while stepping outside that realm to engage readers.