Update: Watch Ilan Stavans in conversation with our Director of Marketing Nathan Rostron on BookTV.

I’m honored that I’ll be speaking with Ilan Stavans—prolific author, translator, critic, Amherst College professor and Publisher of Restless Books—at this year’s Texas Book Festival. Stavans and I will discuss his most recent book, A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States. The book is a bracing corrective to received, mainstream ideas about American history, and it seems especially appropriate to announce the event on Columbus Day, a much-criticized national holiday that some have lobbied to replace with Indigenous People's Day.

From the book's press materials:

Enough with the dead white men! Forget what you learned in school. Ever since Columbus–who was probably a converted Jew–“discovered” the New World, the powerful and privileged have usurped American history. The true story of the United States lies not with the founding fathers or robber barons, but with the country’s most overlooked and marginalized peoples: the workers, immigrants, housewives, and slaves who built America from the ground up and made this country what it is today.

The Texas Book Festival is held every year in the heart of downtown Austin, Texas, along Congress Ave. and in the State Capitol building. The event, which will also be broadcast on C-SPAN’s BookTV, will be from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm on Sunday, October 26, 2014 in the C-SPAN2/ Book TV Tent. We hope to see you there!