Stuck at Home? Support an Austin Author and Read With Your Downtime.

Since you and everyone else is hunkering down in the wake of Mayor Adler’s shelter-in-place mandate, there’s never been a better time to "catch up" on all that reading you have meant to be doing for years. Austin has been hit with the COVID-19 and businesses and individuals are hurting. Here are some Austin authors who could support as well.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

"With its Pac-Man-style cover graphics and vintage Atari mind-set “Ready Player One” certainly looks like a genre item. But Mr. Cline is able to incorporate his favorite toys and games into a perfectly accessible narrative. He sets it in 2044, when there aren’t many original Duran Duran fans still afoot, and most students of 1980s trivia are zealous kids. They are interested in that time period because a billionaire inventor, James Halliday, died and left behind a mischievous legacy. Whoever first cracks Halliday’s series of ’80s-related riddles, clues and puzzles that are included in a film called “Anorak’s Invitation” will inherit his fortune." - New York Times

Good as Gone by Amy Gentry

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "So gripping you might start to question your own family’s past." —Entertainment Weekly “[One] of the most anticipated summer thrillers . . . Gentry's novel isn't primarily about the version of the self that comes from a name and a family of origin; instead, it draws our attention to the self that's forged from sheer survival, and from the clarifying call to vengeance.” —New York Times Book Review

Little by Edward Carey

"An amazing achievement. . . A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself." —Gregory Maguire, New York Times-bestselling author of Wicked

Not Everyone Is Special by Josh Denslow

A teen who can teleport just wants to make his mom happy. A midget working as an elf in a year-round Christmas-themed amusement park battles his archrival: a condescending Santa. You’ve heard of Fight Club, but have you been to the Underground Punch Market? Like the work of George Saunders crossed with Richard Linklater, NOT EVERYONE IS SPECIAL is a collection of slacker fabulist stories that are at once speculative, hilarious, and poignant.

Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester

An International Latino Book Award winner.

“Everyone Knows You Go Home is prescient, tackling issues of family division, the arduous journey of crossing from one country into the next, and the sacrifices we make in exchange for a better future.” —Houston Chronicle

Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth

Deb Olin Unferth’s wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes readers into the minds of these renegades: a farmer’s daughter, a former director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who suddenly comes upon forty thousand hens, and a security guard who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses twenty thousand years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die. In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead them to ruin or revelation.