The Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature has announced a new round of literary all-stars who have committed to spending up to four days in a luxury hotel in Dubai to talk about their books. Frank McCourt, Margaret Atwood, Louis de Bernieres, Karin Slaughter, Kate Mosse, Penny Vincenzi, and Kate Adie will be joining authors like Paolo Coelho and Lynne Truss who were on the roster when EAIFL organizers announced themselves to the international publishing community at the London Book Fair last month.

"I cannot imagine a more vibrant and alive city to host a festival of literature," says festival director Isobel Abulhoul, who is also the co-owner of Magrudy's, an independent bookstore in Dubai. In addition to bringing in a bumper crop of international writers, the festival appears to be explicitly designed to call attention to the literary culture of the United Arab Emirates—both to spotlight significant Arab authors and to emphasize the status of Dubai as a place where people love to read (setting aside the censorship issues that prevent Magrudy's from stocking, say, "anti-religious" books like The God Delusion).

Literary blogger and debut novelist Mark Sarvas sorts through the schedule for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, trying to decide which panels he most wants to see. Mind you, this was taken Saturday morning, before many of us began refusing to walk across the UCLA campus in the blinding light and heat and contented ourselves with meeting our favorite authors in the "green room," for which the Times appropriated the university's faculty lounge—where you could see conversational pairings like Walter Mosley and James Ellroy on a regular basis. (Later in the day, when Richard Price appeared to be signing a copy of Lush Life for Ellroy, it was all taking place too far away for me to get a good picture. But it's seared in my memory.)

I got to meet almost everybody I wanted to meet over the course of the weekend; I was worried Saturday that I'd missed my opportunity to say hello to Pico Iyer, but then I spotted him in the lunch line Sunday afternoon and we chatted briefly about an interview I'd done with him in Seattle a decade ago, and how much I was looking forward to reading his new book about the Dalai Lama, The Open Road. I ran into Mark Harris, the author of Pictures at a Revolution, at the Book Soup booth during one of my few forays outdoors (for an interview you'll read later on), and told him how much I was looking forward to the panel on Hollywood history he was about to do with Peter Biskind—so was everybody else, it seemed, because when I finally got there the auditorium was already filled to capacity.

I think the only person I didn't get to meet was Peter Matthiessen, and I eventually found out that was because he'd never made it to Los Angeles, having bowed out a few days earlier due to health concerns, which I was gravely sorry to hear.

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I didn't get to spend nearly as much time this year at New York Comic Con as I have in years past, but I still got to see plenty of costumes—and because, like most major "comic book" conventions, NYCC is as much about film, television, video games, and lots of other pop culture merchandise, the crowd was a wild mix of costumes. The giant-sized Uglydolls were out in an official promotional capacity, but the Boba Fett was a fan (who was wandering around with a near-identical twin, in a more battered olive-tinged armor). In the short distance from the Javits conference rooms to the main entrance to the show floor, I ran into all sorts of characters, from "a Hellboy in full body paint to a cluster of Batman's archenemies...

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I'm happy to announce that I'll be one of several guest speakers at this year's Ann Arbor Book Festival Writer's Conference on Friday, May 16. It's an all-day sequence of workshops that includes sessions on creative nonfiction writing with Ken Foster, memoir writing with Jane Bernstein, and novel plotting with Maureen Freely (who's also Orhan Pamuk's translator). I'll be talking about "blogging for the serious writer" with Claudia Mair Burney, whose books include Murder, Mayhem, and a Fine Man, its sequel Death, Deceit, and Some Smooth Jazz, and the perfectly titled The Exorsistah. The conference has a $100 registration fee, but the street festival on Saturday is free, and that features appearances by Lisa Tucker, Daniel Radosh, Nicholas Delbanco, and NEA blogger David Kipen, among many others.

Dale Peck and Colum McCann were among the literary players recruited to join a group of media types on the Queen Mary 2 last week for the unveiling of this year's PEN World Voices schedule. After riding a bus from SoHo to Red Hook, and passing through all the security checkpoints, we were greeted with Champagne in the ship's ampitheatre and, eventually, welcomed by the commodore, who made a series of vaguely suggestive remarks about his ocean liner in rich, stentorian tones reminiscent of Geoffrey Palmer before passing the microphone on to World Voices organizer Caro Llewellyn and PEN president Francine Prose, who noted that the week-long literary festival is "not only interesting and fun but also increasingly important and useful."

"This isn't just a random collection of great authors," she added, after running through some of the biggest names among the 170 scheduled guests. (Bernard-Henri Lévy talks Darfur with Mia Farrow! Joyce Carol Oates has questions for Umberto Eco!) The theme of this year's festival, "Public Lives/Private Lives," promises to be a lively one, possibly encompassing everything from government intrusion into privacy to bloggers spilling their most intimate secrets online.

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The organizers of BookExpo America have announced that the programming for Saturday, May 31 will be centered on issues affecting the comic book market, kicking off with an all-star breakfast with Bone creator Jeff Smith (left), Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and current Hulk scripter Jeph Loeb (who also co-produces the NBC drama Heroes). After that, the day is filled with panels to teach bookstore owners how to build up a kid-friendly graphic novel section, how to deal with books aimed at mature readers, and how publishers aim to sustain the momentum in the manga market.

"Since I run both BEA and New York Comic Con, this is sort of like a dream come true," says BookExpo show manager Lance Fensterman in the press release announcing the events. "I get to take one big show, in this case New York Comic Con, and give it a little home inside our other big show! Without a doubt, the strength of the content and personalities involved in our graphic novel programming this year give credence to the explosive impact graphic novels are having on the publishing and book retail industry."

(Smith: Cartoon Books; Bone: Boneville.com; as seen on Vulture)

N.M. Kelby was kind enough to loan me her Flip video camcorder during the Pulpwood Queens Girlfriends Weekend book festival, so I was able to shoot this footage of author Melanie Wells reading a short passage from her latest novel, My Soul to Keep, which explains some of the motivations of Peter Terry, the antagonist in an ongoing series of spiritual skirmishes. (Sorry about the sound quality.) Then her best friend, singer-songwriter Trish Murphy, sings the first half of a song called "Johnny Too Blue." The two best friends frequently go on getaway writing weekends together, and I'm hoping they'll start up their "Thelma & Louise" blog and talk some more about their creative lives.

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Although there were a couple dozen authors in attendance during the Pulpwood Queens Girlfriends Weekend book fair last week, in some ways the "star" of the festival was Heather Hornback Bland (far left), author of the memoir God Said Yes. I was not able to attend her Friday night presentation, but I did sit in on a talk she gave earlier in the day, when festival organizer Kathy Patrick pre-empted the scheduled series of author panels because Bland had said she was feeling well enough that she wanted to speak. And that's how I got to hear the remarkable story of how she was crushed under the wheels of her mother's car when she was four years old and has had somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 operations since, which she told the audience has resulted in more than $1 million in debt, with one near-death experience during a 27-hour operation, two near-miraculous pregnancies, and many other personal travails along the way.

Patrick first encountered Bland at the Southern Independent Bookseller's Convention last fall; convinced, as she emailed other authors, that "this woman has been sent to us by God," Patrick organized one fundraising drive for Bland in Jefferson, Texas, two months ago and encouraged all authors whose books had been chosen for the Pulpwood Queens book clubs to send autographed editions which she would collate, along with signed books from her personal library (including a 35th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird signed by Harper Lee), to create a large lot to be auctioned off for additional funds.

Bland told the small audience at her talk Friday morning that she is currently fighting a staph infection* and can't always raise the $8400 a month she needs for the special prescriptions, so some months she has to do with less (or without). She told us that her liver is in such bad shape she could die at any moment; despite the severity of her infection, though, Bland shows no trace of blemish or jaundice, and displays amazing resilience for someone in her condition—she passed by my dinner table early Saturday evening, before the party (which is where I took the picture of her with her best friend/traveling companion/nurse), and informed my group that she'd passed three kidney stones earlier that day. Obviously, her outspoken religious convictions are a major component of that self-presentation; her website lists several previous speaking engagements at churches throughout Kentucky, and she mentioned in passing Friday morning that she'd learned that the 20/20 producer who did a story on her (which aired before Christmas, and appears to be scheduled for a repeat in late February) had told her that their interview sessions had inspired him to begun praying again. It is a conviction that is shared among her supporters. "I have never felt more driven to helping someone who is living testimony that God is with us," Patrick wrote in her initial appeal on Bland's behalf. "She is here for a reason, of that I have no doubt, and I do believe that God is calling us to help her."

*According to another festival attendee, medical researchers describe the strand of MRSA infection Bland carries as more contagious than normal.

I got back last night from my speaking engagement at the Pulpwood Queens annual "Girlfriends Weekend" in Jefferson, Texas. This year's festivities were somewhat sparsely attended; by my own rough eyeball estimate, the crowd during Saturday's main event, held in the lobby of the local high school, was significantly less than half of what I saw last year—at times, it almost felt like the author-fan ratio was 1:1—and itthere were a whole bunch of book club members showing up for the Saturday night dance party I could swear I hadn't met before then. On the other hand, that could just be because I didn't recognize them after they'd undergone their Pulpwood makeovers. Above, for example, are novelists Andrea Portes, Cai Emmons, and Ellen Baker listening to one of the panels Saturday afternoon, and then later that night at the party...

Organizer Kathy Patrick, who took a break from her promotional tour for The Pulpwood Queens' Tiara-wearing, Book-sharing Guide to Life to return home for the weekend's events, reasoned that the drop in attendance was likely due to local residents' fears about the economy, but added that the people who did come spent as much at the side tables set up by Barron's, a local indie bookstore, as they had last year. (It's worth noting, too, again by my eyeball estimate, that almost as many East Texans were willing to spend $125 to attend the author panels as I saw at last fall's book festival in Omaha, which was free to the public.)

More details to come, as I sort through the photos and the notes...

The news that Lewis Black (left) will perform at this year's BookExpo America reminded me that event director Lance Fensterman had recently relaunched his blog as "MediumAtLarge," so that's where I went to swipe an image of the comedian, who will do a stand-up show at Los Angeles's Orpheum Theater to raise funds for American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the AAP's Get Caught Reading campaign. (Also, he has a book coming out from Riverhead just a few days later.)

Another tidbit from the blog, which also covers Fensterman's activities for New York Comic-Con and New York Anime Expo: Maus creator Art Spiegelman will do BookExpo this year, "in a totally new format for the show."