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Your A-List: Best Local Author
(Statesman writer and noted beer enthusiast Patrick Beach, who happens to be moderating an event with author Chuck Palahniuk Thursday at UT, contributed to this post.)
While Austin is known as a music town, a burgeoning (where are those tax credits?) film town, and an outdoor lovers town, it is also obviously a city that loves books. It is almost de rigeur for a university town to be one that harbors a love of books, and Austin is no exception. With humor writers, famous historians and novelists dotting out intellectual landscape, there is no shortage of homegrown literary talent.
The winner of the Your A-List poll for best local author is novelist Ben Rehder, who, with 30 percent of the vote, beat out novelist and comedian Owen Egerton (29 percent) by a bookmark.
From Mr. Beach: “Edgar Award finalist Ben Rehder writes comic mysteries set in Blanco County and featuring a game warden, law enforcement types and wildly colorful miscreants. If Carl Hiaasen grew up in the Texas Hill Country, this is what he’d write like. His latest is “Holy Moly,” (St. Martin’s Press, $24.95), which begins with a televangelist’s attempts to build a megachurch along the Pedernales River and, predictably, devolves into mayhem and merriment.”
Others receiving votes
- Owen Egerton, 29 percent
- Jeff Abbott, 9 percent
- Kinky Friedman, 9 percent
- David Lindsey, 4 percent
- David Oshinsky, 3 percent
- Sarah Bird, 2 percent
- Joe Nick Patoski, 2 percent
- Tim O’Brien, 2 percent
- Spike Gillespie, 2 percent
- Turk Pipkin, 2 percent
- Edwin “Bud” Shrake, 2 percent
- Stephen Harrigan, 1 percent
- Lawrence Wright, < 1 percent
- Diane Fanning, < 1 percent
- H.W. Brands, < 1 percent
- Craig McCullough, < 1 percent
- Steven Saylor, < 1 percent
- Douglas Brinkley, < 1 percent
- James D. Hornfischer, < 1 percent
Write-ins: Jim W. Apfelbaum, Owen Egerton, Allen Erwin, Gabrielle Faust, Elizabeth Moon, Tim O’Brien, Joe O’Connell, Benjamin Reed, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Papa Joe Summy
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Comments
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By Suzie
June 9, 2008 1:14 PM | Link to this
Until you can get the voting down to one vote per IP, the only thing these A-List polls will ever show me is who in Austin knows how to spam vote. It’s beyond ridiculous that Owen Eggerton would win a Best Author in Austin title just as it is downright silly that Kick Butt Coffee would get 360 votes in a time period that their closest competitor would get 20 some odd votes.
By Suzie
June 9, 2008 1:19 PM | Link to this
Not that he won it, but 29% is pretty much winning in this poll. The other guy I’ve never heard of, but I can’t make it throguh the first chapter of a Egerton book. Those guys either have a lot of friends or the whole city is illiterate.
By bob
June 11, 2008 12:26 PM | Link to this
Suzie is correct. Polls are meaningless when the same person could conceivably vote 168 times during the week (though that person would not sleep and generally have no time for other activities). Other sites, like MSNBC.com, are set up to take just one vote per computer so the results of their polls seem more realistic.
By bob2
June 26, 2008 1:02 PM | Link to this
Tim O’Brien is so head and shoulders above the rest of this list. But then again, he’s still the top author from Austin. Minnesota that is.