Book review: 'The Possessed' by Elif Batuman

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives.com

Russian literary scholars aren't known for their sense of humor, unless they're Elif Batuman. Her new book, The Possessed, a collection of essays that can best be described as a series of academic misadventure stories, is possibly the best thing to come out of a graduate program in recent years.

Describing a conference about the writer Isaac Babel (author of The Red Cavalry) at Stanford University, where Batuman did her graduate work and now teaches, she notes that "some Russian people are skeptical or even offended when foreigners claim an interest in Russian literature." This parochial attitude can easily turn into obtuseness, as when a scholar suggests that Batuman would never be able to fully understand Babel because of his "specifically Jewish alienation."

To which she replies: "Right, as a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew." To which the man replies: "So you see the problem."

Batuman rarely confronts such oddities head on. She usually lets people and events speak for themselves – often hilariously. On a trip to St. Petersburg for The New Yorker, where she's gone to visit the re-creation of an 18th-century palace made of ice, she's instructed by her editor to "interview the guy who made the doorknobs." Later, the builder of the ice palace asks, "What doorknobs?"

But Batuman isn't merely setting up straw men so she can appear more intelligent. She wears her knowledge lightly, while at the same time still conveying her passion for the books and the people who made them. She's also not shy about discussing the vagaries of academic life, such as hustling for grant money.

In a chapter titled "Who Killed Leo Tolstoy?" she wants grant money to help pay for a trip to a conference at Tolstoy's estate. To qualify for an extra $1,500, she devises a theory that Tolstoy was murdered. Her academic department doesn't buy it, but she makes the trip nevertheless, losing her luggage along the way. "Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you," she quips.

As she is forced to wear the same flannel shirt, sweat pants and flip-flops, the collected Tolstoy scholars come to believe she's a committed Tolstoyan – that is, a follower who's vowed to return to a peasant lifestyle, shunning materialism for a life of work and simplicity. It doesn't help that she wanders the grounds "looking for clues" to Tolstoy's "murder." Ultimately, she determines: "The flies buzz across generations; I know they know, but they won't tell me."

Throughout the book, she conveys a graduate seminar's worth of scholarship in many of the great Russian authors and a few who are not so great, plus some who aren't even technically Russian. (She has a wonderful, moving three-part story interspersed throughout the book about a summer she spent trying to learn Uzbek.)

By writing about her personal experiences with such charm, Batuman manages to make literature accessible in a way few critics can: She loves the Russians, and because, over the course of the book, you come to love her a little bit, you come to love the Russians as well. She's an example of not just how to appreciate literature, but how to live life through literature – without losing yourself.

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives.com.

Book review: 'Happy' by Alex Lemon

Dallas Morning News, Sunday, January 10, 2010

We are, as a culture, obsessed with medical dramas. Just look at the history of television and you'll see dozens of shows based in hospitals, from St. Elsewhere to ER to House.

And while plenty of books have been written about medicine from the doctor's perspective, far fewer have come from the patients. Rarer still are those written by men. One thinks of William Styron's Darkness Visible, about his descent into depression; last year's Guts by Robert Nylen, about his battle with cancer; or Tony Judt's recent work for the New York Review of Books about suffering from ALS. Alex Lemon's Happy is a welcome addition to that short bookshelf.

The title is itself deliberately deceptive. "Happy" is the author's nickname from when he was a foul-mouthed, hard-partying catcher for the baseball team at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. As we meet him at the start of the book, he thinks: "I must have drunk a bottle of Drano last night, snorted a bag of glass, and leapt open-armed from the top of the stairs. A tree. A roof. The moon." His head is "fuzzy," he can't focus, he has vertigo so bad that he falls over getting dressed, and his vision is blurry and bounces so badly that he can't catch a baseball.

An MRI reveals that Happy has a vascular malformation in his brain and that it has been hemorrhaging.

What follows is Lemon's chronicle of living with the ailment, with the help of friends, lovers, family and lots of self-medicating with alcohol and drugs. When that proves impossible, he decides to have the malformation operated on. The problem is on the brain stem, and the surgery puts him at risk of death. Lemon's description of his erratic behavior in the face of his fear – leading up to the surgery and during his recovery – is gripping, visceral and moving.

Lemon's tales of debauchery and sheer panic make for as compelling a story as others by young men who party too much and put themselves in peril, such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (however disingenuous) and Brad Land's Goat. The book is full of memorable observations, such as his description of a neurologist's exam room and its row upon row of plastic models of brains that "line and stack the shelves like championship basketballs" and moments of honest pain, such as when he uses an X-Acto knife "like a toothpick" to slice his gums when he chews tobacco while anticipating his surgery.

Needless to say, Lemon survived; he now teaches English at Texas Christian University. In this fine memoir, he touches briefly on at least one more subject – his abuse as a child at the hands of a teenage cousin – that would merit further autobiography. If he finds he has the strength (for he still suffers some from his illness) and emotional resilience to write, it too would be welcome.

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives.com.

books@dallasnews.com

2009 Year in Review from the Dallas Morning News

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

The year 2009 has been described as the Year of Anxiety, so it should come as no surprise that the books published in 2009 reflected scary stuff – from government conspiracy theories to zombies and, natch, vampires.

In Texas, writers both living and deceased made their mark on the national literary scene. Meanwhile, booksellers were battling it out for your discretionary dollar by making books cheap, cheap, cheap. All told, 2009 was a great year to be a book lover.

Herewith, our top 10 literary events of 2009:

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Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol

1. The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown's follow-up to his global best-seller The Da Vinci Code was the one book everyone wanted to read. And Brown didn't disappoint. Trading the mysteries of Christianity for the mysteries of American history, Brown titillated his fans with conspiracy theories dating back to the Founding Fathers. Brown's publisher, Doubleday, printed 5 million copies to start, andAmazon.com readers downloaded it faster than any other book in the retailer's history. It was just what most people needed in a tough year: a bit of frivolous distraction.

2. Going Rogue: Love her or hate her, Sarah Palin is hard to ignore. After failing to become the first female vice-president, the lady from Alaska moved home, quit her job, and (with help from writer Lynn Vincent) penned this book, which has taken her from Oprah to Plano – where her reading at Legacy Books drew more than 1,000 supporters, who snapped up all available tickets in less than two days.

3. The Last Olympian: Perhaps the most popular book to come out of Texas this year was the finale of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Published in May, the novel entranced teens, who raced through its 400 pages to learn the fate of Percy (a son of Poseidon) and his friends as they fight an army of monsters to get to the portal to Mount Olympus (which is on the top of the Empire State Building). Look for Riordan's popularity to soar as the movie adaptation of the first in the series, The Lightning Thief, hits theaters in February.

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4. Attention for Texas authors:Austinite John Pipkin, former executive director of the Writer's League of Texas, picked up the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize for his bookWoodsburner, which depicts the day Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down the forest surrounding Walden Pond. And the late Houston novelist and short-story writer Donald Barthelme finally got the biography he deserved in the form of Tracy Daugherty's Hiding Man –something that should firmly establish Barthelme's place high in the American literary canon.

5. Two top tens: A pair of books firmly rooted in the Lone Star State – Lit by Mary Karr and Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls – landed on the New York Times Book Review's list of the top ten books of 2009. In Lit, Karr, who hails from Groves, Texas, offers a chronicle of her descent into alcoholism and unexpected conversion to Catholicism. Walls' Half Broke Horses is a fictional account of the life of her West Texas grandmother.

In a year with so many A-list authors, from Barbara Kingsolver toMargaret Atwood, putting out "big books," it's nice affirmation to know that lives lived in this part of the country are as interesting to a national audience as are those lived in Manhattan or Brooklyn, where far too many books seem to be set.

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Seth Grahame Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

6. Zombie-mania: Something must have eaten book buyers' brains, as avid readers put Pride and Prejudice and Zombies onto the best-seller list. The parody by Seth Grahame-Smith injected the undead into Jane Austen's classic Regency romance and proved astonishingly popular. It also established a new genre of "enhanced" classics which now includes Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, The Adventures of Huck Finn and Zombie Jim and others.

7. Christians vs. vampires: It wasn't long ago when the Left Behindbooks, a series of Christian novels depicting the "end of days," rivaledHarry Potter for the top of the best-sellers list. The times have changed, and there was no surer sign than the failure of the much-hyped Christian Book Expo held in March at the Dallas Convention Center. Organizers had expected 10,000 to 15,000 people, but only 1,500 attended.

In contrast, more than 3,000 fans of Stephenie Meyer's vampire-romance Twilight series paid $255 each to attend the inaugural TwiCon at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel in August. The event was so successful, organizers are moving it to Las Vegas and Toronto for 2010.

8. Mayborn conference: One book event in the area that was an undeniable success was the fifth annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, held in July in Grapevine. Hundreds gathered to hear talks from A-list literary figures including Paul Theroux, Ira Glass and Alma Guillermoprieto. Interesting, focused and efficiently run by the administrators from the journalism school at the University of North Texas, The Mayborn can be ranked among the best writers' conferences in the United States.

9. Book price war: In October, Amazon.com and Wal-Mart reduced the price of some hardcover bestsellers, including John Grisham's FordCountry, to $9 or less. The low-low prices didn't last, but it underscored how, in no point in history, have there never been more books available to so many people for so little.

10. E-books gain popularity: It took a decade, but e-books are finally catching on. The introduction of new, easier-to-use reading software for smart phones, such as the iPhone, and new devices, such as Barnes & Noble's recently-introduced Nook, have made them all the more appealing.

Amazon.com's Kindle still reigns supreme, with many of the books priced at $9.99. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos now says that the company sells e-books to print books at a ratio of nearly one to two; he is confidently predicting the day will soon be here when Amazon will sell more electronic books than physical books. Keep an eye on two Austin-based firms – LibreDigital, a company that converts books to digital formats, and BooksOnBoard, one of the biggest e-book retailers in the United States. Both are innovators in the field of digital publishing.

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives.com.

MPIBA Gets Boost from Guns, Tourists, Hype

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 9/29/2009 1:34:00 PM

"Many of our stores are small, in remote or rural areas, and don't have the opportunity to travel to BEA, so the trade show is important to them," said Meghan Goel, children's book manager at BookPeople Bookstore in Austin, TX and the incoming president of the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association (MPIBA) (who had just returned from Kenya where she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro). The annual meeting returned to Denver after shifting last year to Colorado Springs, and attracted approximately the same number of attendees as last year.

At the association’s general meeting, executive director Lisa Knudsen praised outgoing president Andy Nettell of Arches Book Company in Moab, UT for his three years of service and his “calm” demeanor. She announced that 13 new stores had joined MPIBA since last year bringing the total number of members to 167. She admitted that the association’s finances had suffered due to last year’s market meltdown, with the association losing nearly a third of its financial reserves, some $78,000 in the stock market. “We’re still here,” said Knudsen, who added that as the market has bounced back, so has MPIBA’s finances.

She also touted a number of marketing moves the MPIBA has recently made, including the launch of the “Reading the West” program this past June. The program selects specific titles that are relevant to the region to promote at MPIBA, each month. “The board wanted to do this because some of our members are not in the ABA [American Booksellers Association] and don’t use IndieBound.” The association has also launched a new blog at http://www.mountainsplains.org/blog/.

In April, the MPIBA hosted the first of a planned series of “Regional Focus Meetings,” with the inaugural session held in Austin, Texas. Twenty people from 12 stores attended. Plans for 2010 include meetings to be held in Texas, most likely in Houston, as well as in Colorado, Utah, Montana and Arizona. “We’re still pinning them down, but we’ve had a lot of interest,” said BookPeople’s Goel.

Additional information sessions focused on coping with the recession, with numerous booksellers reporting that they have cut staff (often by not replacing lost employees) and added additional sidelines. This being the West, and considering the incredible jump in sales of firearms since the election of President Obama, it should come as no surprise that a number of stores reported a sizable boost coming from the sales of books about firearms.

That being said, there was little evidence of gun-related titles on the exhibition floor. Smaller booths from some of the major publishers -- Random House for example, had just a single table – were somewhat offset by the addition of seating next to each table, a change Knudsen said was intended to facilitate more sit down meetings for the taking of orders. Small regional publishers dominated the floor, ranging from Denver’s Flying Pen Press – a specialist in sci fi and speculative fiction -- to Mukilteo, Washington’s Basho Press, which is entirely focused on haiku gift books and was given a slot to speak at the “pick of the list” sessions.

Hachette Book Group produced a specialist catalog of “staycation” titles for the show, a likely response to the economic crisis. The branding proved a mismatch for what booksellers – particularly in heavily touristed locals – were reporting.

Tommie Plank of Covered Treasures Bookstore in Monument, Colo. remarked, “People are still traveling, they’re just driving a few hours, instead. Sure, people aren’t traveling to Europe and we’re not seeing as many people from the coasts, but we are seeing a lot of tourists from Colorado and surrounding states. Daiva Chesonis, book buyer for Between the Covers in Telluride, Colo. concurred, saying that one of the stores bestselling titles this summer was a Colorado driving atlas.

As far as sales are concerned, booksellers seem to be holding steady throughout the region. Plank reported that her store’s sales were up 2% over last year, due both to continued tourist traffic and the store’s proximity to the Air Force Academy and various military bases. “We have a lot of retired military in our area and since they’re retired they can’t lose their jobs, so they’re buying just as many books as before.” Local author Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman is currently proving popular.

Even so,“The economy has tempered expectations for the fall,” said Drew Goodman, a MPIBA board member and sales manager of the University Campus Store at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “It’s hard to tell what direction things are going to go in – is the recession over, as everyone is saying, or is this just a lull?,” said Goodman. “It’s hard to tell and there are mixed feelings out there. One thing that we know is there are a lot of big books out there for the season, it’s one of the best I can remember in a long time.” Goodman added that although his store was selling plenty of copies of The Lost Symbol and True Compass, his profits came from his ability to “make books” by hand selling. He offered Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night as an example: “In August, we picked it as ‘Book of the Month’ and sold 30 copies, making it one of our bestselling titles,” he said.

Cathy Langer of the Tattered Cover agreed, adding that it’s the “sleepers that rise to the surface” that really matter to independent stores. One book she expected to do especially well in the region is Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn. She’s also encouraged by the appearance of Brown, Kennedy, Krakauer, and even Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro on the fall lists. “After all the glum news this year, the hype is nice,” she said.

In 'Strength in What Remains,' author tells story of immigration, return to home country

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, September 20, 2009

Tracy Kidder's ninth book, "Strength in What Remains," tells the story of Deogratias — called Deo — a Burundian medical student who, after fleeing his country's civil war in 1994, makes his way to New York with $200 in his pocket and speaking only French. There he squats as a homeless person in Central Park; he delivers groceries for $15 a day.

This is before he's taken in by Charlie and Nancy Wolf, a charitable couple with a big heart and a Manhattan apartment with an extra room — one that happened to be full of books, one Kidder describes as "a room for the end of a journey of the body, but also for the continuation of a journey of the mind." They encourage Deo to pick up with his studies, and he eventually enrolls at Columbia University and, ultimately, Dartmouth Medical School.

What initially might seem like an intriguing, if conventional, tale of transformation turns out to have a remarkable coda, as Kidder divides the book between Deo's stateside story and his return to Burundi to open a free clinic in his home town.

Kidder spoke by phone from his home in Massachusetts.

Austin American-Statesman: You were introduced to Deo through Dr. Paul Farmer, his mentor and the subject of 'Mountains Beyond Mountains' (Kidder's 2003 book about a doctor who conducts medical missions to Haiti). Is this new book a kind of sequel to the Farmer book?

Tracy Kidder:Deo and Paul do have things in common — they are very close friends. When I first met Paul, he was already very well known in medical anthropology; he was a clinic hospital-builder par excellence. He's extraordinary. Deo had been through a crucible of war, been through a miraculous escape, come to America, learned English, but Deo is more of an ordinary person than Paul. So, in that sense, they are not sequels.

The first half of the book focuses on Deo's travails in New York, and it's not a part of the city people often see in books — homeless people living in Central Park, the service entrances to Fifth Avenue high-rises. Was that deliberate?

First and foremost I'm a storyteller, and that's an important part of Deo's story. But that part of New York is designed to be invisible. It's very tempting if you're privileged, particularly in a place like New York, to think that the world is properly ordered or that your job is representative of who you are. When you get into a taxi and the driver has a foreign accent, you should wonder, "Where did they come from? Why they are here?" At Columbia, one of Deo's favorite writers was W.E.B. DuBois, who said, and I'm paraphrasing: To be a poor man anywhere is hard, but to be a poor man in a country of dollars is the hardest of all.

You clearly admire Deo, and Paul Farmer for that matter, and many of your books seem to be about people pushing the limits of human potential.

The story I've told is about courage and endurance and idealism enacted. We have to remember that we all walk around with the most complex structure in the known universe on our shoulders. Deo is pretty extraordinary.

To what do you see this as a distinctly American story? The embodiment of the American dream?

I think it is distinctive insofar that he's now an American citizen; he rallied a collection of American and Burundians to something he had dreamed of as a child: to go back to Burundi to create a medical system to serve the poor of whatever ethnicity. He's done that and his aims are much larger. This is one small beginning.

Would you describe the clinic Deo started?

It's called Village Health Works and in its first year it saw 28,000 patients — from Burundi, but also from Tanzania and the Congo. A few who came weren't sick. When asked why they came, they said, "To see America." At first I thought this was a misconception, but it was true. This represents America at its best. In miniature, it's what President Obama was talking about in Ghana — African and American cooperation; it's a little instrument of peace.

It's also a different view of Africa than one usually gets from the news, for example.

We tend to look at Africa as a single dysfunctional country, which is nonsense. It is many dozens of countries with different problems. I am aware that Westerners only talk about the bad news from Africa, and I distrust that sentiment in Western mouths — either that or something that sounds like political correctness, and that is usually a sign that that group is really getting shafted. I wrote a book about a person who came from a place that hasn't produced a lot of good news in a century, but has a different story to tell. The real question is how to get people in the West and in the Western countries to help in an effective way.

Is that something you are trying to accomplish with your writing?

I think the trick for people attempting to write stories about Africa is to find a way to move people, to find that this suffering person is the same as you, just like you, and in another circumstance it could have been you.

Review: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

'Await Your Reply' is a compelling look at a trio with similar traits whose lives intersect

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, August 23, 2009

A man is hurtling along a pitch-dark highway in rural Michigan with his son shaking in pain. The son's severed hand rests on ice in a Styrofoam cooler on the seat between them. So begins Dan Chaon's fascinating second novel, "Await Your Reply," and the book never lets up from there. What follows is an unsettling, modern gothic novel about the nature of identity, one that wonders whether dozens of lesser lives can ultimately add up to one big one. It's a book, literally and figuratively, about taking lives.

The novel shifts between three distinct storylines. There's Lucy, an 18-year-old high school graduate who runs off with her Maserati-driving history teacher to an abandoned hotel on a dried-out lake in Nebraska. There's Ryan, the young man with the severed hand, who is presumed dead after disappearing from Northwestern University, but is living with his previously absentee, pothead father in a cabin in the Michigan woods. Finally, there's 31-year-old Miles Cheshire, a drifter who works in a Cleveland magic shop and has spent much of the past decade chasing his schizophrenic twin brother, Hayden, across the country. These three characters share numerous traits: estranged or dead parents, mentally ill siblings and a fierce intelligence. Each is also part of a couple that is wholly intimate - the sentence "You're the only person in the world who still loves me" is repeated several times - but also virtual strangers.

Inevitably, the storylines intersect, but it is Miles and Hayden's story that dominates. As "Await Your Reply" progresses, we learn that the twins began to diverge in high school, a time when Hayden's illness began to manifest itself and he started shifting between reality and a series of fantasy lives, one as an abused cabin boy on a pirate ship, who repeatedly has his throat slit, and another in which the history of the United States is mixed up with a personal mythology. As a teen, and with the help of Miles, Hayden began recording this mythology in an atlas and includes such phenomena as pyramids in North Dakota and spirit towers in arctic Canada. As an adult, the mythology would expand to include a vast global conspiracy run by the big banks, powerful lawyers and other assorted Bilderbergers.

"Looking back," Chaon writes, "it was as if there had been two different lives that Miles was leading - one narrated by Hayden, the other the life he was living separately ..." Halfway through the novel, having chased Hayden to Omaha, Neb., Houston, and even farther afield, Miles begins to question his own grip on reality. Along with Miles, the reader is forced to question what is real and what is merely fantasy, and a kind of literary game ensues.

Chaon sets the action almost entirely in the blank, wide-open Midwest, a characteristic that makes "Await Your Reply" all the more haunting. The characters rarely encounter other people, except in memory, and their physical isolation gives them ample opportunity to explain themselves to each other in a series of stories that are both truth and lies. It's like a literary version of Epimenides' famous paradox: Am I lying, or am I lying when I say that I never tell the truth? Teasing out the truth is one of the numerous pleasures of this fine novel.

Another is the plot, which is surprisingly kinetic for what is largely a psychological drama. To describe what happens is likely to give too much away, but the title does offer a hint: The phrase "await your reply" is referenced as the closing line in a common spam message, specifically the kind that offers you millions of dollars provided you're willing to give your bank account and Social Security numbers to a grieving stranger in West Africa. That should give you an idea of where the book is, eventually, headed.

Chaon's timing couldn't be better: "Await Your Reply" arrives Tuesday, a week after the Justice Department indicted three men (two of them Russian) for the theft of more than 130 million credit card numbers in what is said to be the biggest case of computer fraud and identity theft in U.S. history. If you want to get into the heads of the perpetrators, this book is a place to start.

But saying this is a book about computer-assisted identity theft is like saying that murder can be reduced to the weapon used - each is just a tool to achieve a greater (or lesser, depending on your point of view) psychological aim.

There are echoes and allusions to H.P. Lovecraft, Patricia Highsmith, Peter Straub, Stephen King and Shirley Jackson all over "Await Your Reply"; however, a more apt and timely comparison is with Thomas Pynchon. I'm not talking about the Cheech and Chong-meet-Raymond Chandler variety of Pynchon seen in the recently released "Inherent Vice," but the vintage paranoid Pynchon of "V" and "The Crying of Lot 49." Chaon has produced a book that is closer to Pynchonesque than has Pynchon himself.

Of course, that kind of recommendation might just turn people off the book, so let me say that another set of books to which Chaon's might invite comparison is Stieg Larsson's best-sellers "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played With Fire," books that also feature an orphaned computer hacker - albeit one who is a hero and not a villain.

These titles share some of the same DNA or, if you will, computer code with "Await Your Reply," though Chaon's book is far less cartoonish, which makes it all the more chilling and convincing in its conclusions about the ultimate fragility of the self.

Dallas to host 4 days of 'Twilight'

12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, July 29, 2009

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives.com and covers the South for Publishers Weekly.

If you encounter a group of dramatically dressed women walking the streets of downtown Saturday night sporting Goth garb, Venetian masks and fangs, cover your necks: You've just encountered some of the 3,000 Twilight devotees in town for TwiCon 2009, four days of Stephenie Meyer-inspired mania.

Expect lots of screaming – of a good kind.

The Twilight books, featuring the star-crossed lovers Edward, a vampire, and Bella, a human, have sold 53 million copies worldwide. The first movie in the series grossed more than $380 million, and the sequel New Moon is due in November. So if the phenomenon is not quite at Harry Potter levels, it does seem here to stay.

TwiCon 2009 has sold out, even at $255 a ticket. That buys attendees four days of access to serious-minded academic panel discussions (one is called "Your mood swings are kinda giving me whiplash: Twilight Fans and the Negotiation of Gender and Feminism"), Bella-themed self-defense classes, a TwilightMOMs meeting room, a fan fiction contest and (natch) a Red Cross blood drive.

Meet the cast

The highlight for many will be the opportunity to mingle with cast members from the movies. None of the leads will be there, but the schedule includes a half-dozen others, such as Alex Meraz, who plays a werewolf in New Moon, and one-time Midland resident Jackson Rathbone, who played Jasper Hale in Twilight. (Autograph and photography sessions with the stars cost extra.)

There are sessions on running Twilight fan sites, writing seminars, talks about vampire genetics and an end-of-conference "Volturi Masque Ball" – a Venetian-style ball modeled on one from the books and hosted by the Volturi, the de facto royal family of vampires, who live in Italy. TwiCon's version will feature music by Twilight tribute bands, and the Volturi will be played by the conference organizers.

Online groundswell

TwiCon is the brainchild of 19-year-old Becka Grapsy, a student at Penn State University, and Bailey Gauthier, a 20-something Canadian (a.k.a., vlogger "NoMoreMarbles"), who together last year circulated an online petition among Twilight fans asking about interest in a convention and gathered some 10,000 names.

The result caught the interest of North Carolina-based freelance book publicist Becky Scoggins. "I contacted Becka and Bailey last August, and we decided to form a company to stage it," Scoggins said. She emphasizes that the event is unofficial and not endorsed by Meyer or her publisher Little, Brown.

Dallasites may be disappointed to learn that their city was chosen as the site for TwiCon not because Twilight fans have any particular affinity for the place, but because it is convenient to get to and relatively affordable.

Contrary to the general perception that Twilight fans are primarily tween girls, "Eighty percent of those registered fall in the 25- to 40-year-old age range," said Scoggins. "The rest are 13-25, and nearly all are girls and women. There are some men, but those are almost all dads."

A few guys

One young male fan who will be there is 20-year-old Richardson-native Kaleb Nation, who runs the popular Web site TwilightGuy.com and whose debut novel, Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse, is being published on Sept. 1. He's one of the featured guests.

Scoggins says interest in the convention has been strong enough that she and her partners have planned two more for next year: one in Las Vegas and one in Toronto.

And if all goes well, Scoggins says that she might approach Meyer, her publisher and Summit Entertainment, who is producing the films, to officially participate.

"Our biggest goal for this year is to make sure that Stephenie knows we appreciate her," said Scoggins. "We're not trying to make money off of her, we just want her to know that 3,000 fans got together to talk about her books. To even think that people are getting together to talk about books feels really good."

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives.com and covers the South for Publishers Weekly.