As it turns out, a good Twitter account doesn't necessarily make a good television show. Nonfiction funny man Justin Halpern learned that lesson the nationally televised way when real-life anecdotes from his hilariously crabby father translated poorly from social media into a cheesy, laugh-grabbing sitcom starring William Shatner. (Captain Kirk cannot save everyone.)

So this year, Halpern channeled his riotously funny introspection (and his father's blunt advice) into his own history -- and he's already sold the rights to Warner Brothers. With I Suck at Girls, Halpern's latest novel, the author explores the pros, cons and painful embarrassments of the romantic relationships he sacrificed on his way to the altar. Let's just say he's not a smooth operator.

Before Halpern brings the book to the LoDo Tattered Cover, 1628 16th Street, on Monday, May 21, Westword talked to him about poop, his family and which of his stories won't ever make it into a book:

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You've heard of running away from home. But author Jennifer Wilson, after losing her savings to the stock-market crash, gathered up her family in Des Moines and ran away to home, or at least that's the way she characterizes it in her memoir/travelogue Running Away to Home.

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Erika Napoletano

It seems counterintuitive for a business book to tout the virtues of unpopularity, but author Erika Napoletano has thoroughly embraced the concept of unpopularity -- which is not a pejorative term, as she explains in the Q&A that follows. Basically, unpopularity means you don't have mass appeal for everyone, which in turn means that the small, fierce demographic that really gets your business will love you fiercely. And that's what you want, right?

The author, who will sign her new book at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 9, at the Tattered Cover LoDo, recently spoke with us about how the book came to be...and about writing most of The Power of Unpopular at the Tattered Cover on Colfax.

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After racking up awards -- Nebula and Hugo honors for Best Novel -- for his debut novel The Windup Girl in 2009, Paulo Bacigalupi followed up with Ship Breaker, set in an equally dismal, dystopian future, and won another round of awards, including a National Book Award nomination and a Printz Award for Best Young Adult Novel. His latest -- The Drowned Cities, billed as a "companion" to Ship Breaker -- hits bookstore shelves today, and the Paonia-based writer will be reading from the book tonight at the Tattered Cover Highlands Ranch and tomorrow night at the Boulder Bookstore. We caught up with Bacigalupi for a far-ranging chat on the new book and what winds him up.

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If Denver four-year-olds make small talk about literature, surely Maybe a Bear Ate It! would come up. The picture book has been selected as the book in the state's One Book 4 Colorado preschool reading campaign. In theory, every kid in the sandbox will be reading it. 

The story by Robie E. Harris is simple. An unnamed boy or creature -- the drawings by Michael Emberley don't make the protagonist's origins entirely clear -- has lost something. He suspects a bear is responsible. That he lost a book, and is distraught without it, probably contributed to Maybe A Bear Ate It! being selected for the program. 

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It's hard to ever really recover from losing a spelling bee: You remember the terror as you tentatively said another letter, that awful buzzer sound, the eternal shame that you misspelled the word "satellite." But now the first annual Denver Bee this Saturday night is offering a way to put to rest the ghosts of misspellings past (or relive your spelling bee prowess), all while supporting a local literacy organization.

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Following in the footsteps of Wallace Stegner, the "Dean of Western Writers," takes a big pair of shoes. Though we don't know what size award-winning Colorado author Kent Haruf wears, we do know that his literary prowess is deserving of the Wallace Stegner Award, given annually by CU-Boulder's Center of the American West to an individual whose work evokes the cultural identity of the West.

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Photo of Cheryl Strayed by Joni Kabana

What's striking about Cheryl Strayed's writing is its radical sincerity and vulnerability. She pens personal essays as responses in her advice column Dear Sugar (which was written anonymously until recently), dishing out loving, thoughtful advice to questioners she addresses as "honey bun" and "sweet pea." Her new memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which she'll be reading from and signing Friday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Tattered Cover Colfax, lays out another aspect of Strayed's life: her daunting 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. Fresh from losing her mother to cancer and getting a divorce, the young Strayed decided to complete this arduous hike as a way to get back to herself. And through the course of the beautifully-written book, she does. We caught up with the Strayed about her new memoir, giving advice, and her love for Snapple Lemonade.

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Photo by Nicole Waite.

Luis Alberto Urrea really is the story he writes in so many ways: A reporter, poet and novelist, he's covered the illegal immigrant story from the front lines, where he once worked as a relief worker, and found pieces of himself in the fictionalized retelling of the history of his great-aunt Teresita, a Yaqui curandera known as the Saint of Cabora. Sandwiched between his two Teresita books, The Hummingbird's Daughter and the recently released Queen of America, the novel Into the Beautiful North riffed on a more modern story of illegal border-crossings. And Urrea himself is a complete package: The most down-to-earth of men, he considers himself a voice for the people, yet not without a sense of humor.

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Richard Brautigan spent a few years basking in the celebrity sun as the author of such counterculture classics as Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar. But it was a short honeymoon, and the writer, who came up from poverty, fell into a trough of depression and alcoholism later in life. He ended his own life with a gunshot to the head.

Author William "Gatz" Hjortsberg, who was his friend, wasn't willing to let Brautigan be forgotten. His novels were slim but they went deep, and so Hjortsberg went deep into his late friend's life to write Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life & Times of Richard Brautigan, a new biography of nearly 900 pages. Hjortsberg will introduce and sign the book tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Tattered Cover Colfax; visit the website for details.

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