Rain Taxi announces lineup for Twin Cities Book Festival

If you've not yet spent an afternoon at the Twin Cities Book Festival, here's what you can expect: writers everywhere.Readers everywhere. Workshops and sessions on all aspects of the craft. Tables full of books, and journals, and zines; publishers and publicists; games for children; a smattering of music; the occasional gigantic spider. (No worries--last year's Bug Booth was well supervised.)

This year's festival is the 12th annual, still sponsored by Rain Taxi Review of Books, still bringing in big names, but different this year in that it's moving from downtown Minneapolis to the State Fairgrounds.

Here's the lineup of authors, and their newest books:

Kate Bornstein, author of "A Queer and Pleasant Danger."

Mark Z. Danielewski, "The fifty Year Sword."

Susan Isaacs, "Goldberg Variations."

Sharon Olds, "Stag's Leap."

Gerald Stern, "Stealing History" and "In Beauty Bright."

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, "The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories."

Chris Ware, "Building Stories."

Panelists for the many sessions include Amanda Hocking, John Medeiros, Jocelyn Hale, Lorna Landvik, Bree Despain, Anne Greenwood Brown, and many others.

For kids, there's Chris Monroe, Molly Beth Griffin, Kevin Kling, Nancy Carlson ... and more.