Texas Book Festival
The Texas Book Festival celebrates authors and their contributions to the culture of literacy, ideas, and imagination. See the full schedule at texasbookfestival.org.
Book Events at The Contemporary Austin
11A–12P
Hill Country Houses, Cyndy Severson
Spanish Colonial missions, French pioneer log cabins, German stonework, American craftsmanship: the Texas Hill Country boasts all this and more in its incredible array of lush private homes. Even though the Texan West is quite wild, those who live in these homes have found a way to tame the wild while still sustaining the surrounding ecosystem. Cyndy Severson explores the architecture and the grandeur of these luxurious homes in her new book.
12:30–1:30P
Painters in Prehistory, Harry J. Shafer
Harry J. Shafer first published Painters in Prehistory in 1986. Now, some twenty-eight years later, Shafer’s devotion to his work has produced an updated edition, full of revised and expanded research. Discover how Shafer and other scholars have deepened our cultural understanding of rock art and the life of prehistoric Rio Grande canyon dwellers.
3:30–4:30P
Reading Magnum, Steven Hoelscher
The Magnum Photos archive, housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, features more than 200,000 photographs taken by some of the world’s greatest artists. For the first time, this collection has been syndicated into a comprehensive photo cooperative, Reading Magnum. This new book showcases artists’ aesthetic vision and political perspective, as the photographs depict war and conflict, cultural life, social relations, and globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.