Books, inherently, require faith. Faith in an author that he or she will reward the many hours you’ll spend in those pages, faith that a good story will be told, a lesson will be learned, a light will be shone upon a dim corner of the world. If you’re reading this magazine, with its vast and rich history of literary achievement, you’re alive to the pleasures of reading–for school or for no good reason at all. Now you have to give teenagers the benefit of the doubt, that they know what you know, that they do read and will read, that they will keep books alive, as alive as ever–that they will continue to pull the books from the shelves and add to those shelves books of their own. – from “The Future of Words” by Dave Eggers, one of Esquire’s 75 most important people of the 21st century. Dave has always been a big supporter of Litquake, but alas he will be out of town for this year’s festival.

I felt anxious about whether people really believed I was a boy. There was an anxiety of just being him. And there was usually a lot of press. We were doing trips and there was a whole slew of questions that I was hoping I knew the answers to. I was hoping I had the right information about details of his life, like, “When did [JT and Speedie] meet in San Francisco?” That stuff was really tough [to remember]. It was so convoluted, too. People would ask questions and I wouldn’t even know the answer about JT. — Savannah Knoop in Radar, confessing details from her new book Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy. She will appear at Litquake’s Off the Richter Scale at the library’s Koret Auditorium on Saturday between 4-5 pm.

Is Don DeLillo, the king of literary postmodernism, really writing an election blog for The Onion? How postmodern!