The Austin Chronicle/Fado Adult Spelling Bee benefitting Austin Public Library happened last night and I missed it. However, the Texas Book Festival is this weekend and there’s lots of good stuff.

For the kids, Daniel Handler, Lemony Snicket’s alter-ego, will be giving a presentation at the Paramount on that Saturday. Wristbands for admission to the event were distributed a couple of weeks ago at B&N Arboretum and B&N Sunset Valley and sold out quickly. The 12th book in the Series of Unfortunate Events, The Penultimate Peril, was released a little over a week ago.

The big names for the adult authors are probably Bill Clinton and Salman Rushdie. Like Handler, Clinton will also be giving a talk at the Capitol on the Saturday of the festival. The wristbands for admission to that event are sold out as well.

You can check out the list of all the attending authors, both kids and adults. Of course, the festival includes many Texas authors, including Kinky Friedman and locals Michael Corcoran and Marrit Ingman, about whom I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

Alamo Drafthouse is hosting two After Hours screenings as part of the festival. Tonight is Eli Wallach with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly at Alamo South Lamar and tomorrow night is Chris Elliott, screening Cabin Boy at Alamo Downtown. It looks like the Eli Wallach screening is sold out, but there are still tickets available to Chris Elliott. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the two evenings will have a slightly different tone. I haven’t seen or heard much about Elliott lately, but I loved his early 90’s TV show, Get a Life, and he was on board with Letterman before he moved to CBS and started sucking.