It's official: T. Boone Pickens -- for whom the answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind -- is a real author. Author enough, at least, to get invited to the Texas Book Festival down in Austin, which takes place November 1-2 down in Austin and today announced its lineup for the '08 jam.
The Dallas billionaire who will one day own all of our drinking water -- and whose first book, The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future, is just out in stores -- will join the likes of Christopher Buckley, Ann Packer, Richard Price, Roy Blount Jr., Robert Caro, Andre Dubus III, Susan Orlean and other, more familiar literary types. Alas, Pickens appears to be the only Dallas billionaire on the guest list, as Sam Wyly, whose 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire was published by Newmarket last week, did not make the cut. --Robert Wilonsky
