Ngugi Wa Thiongo

San Francisco's Litquake announced the schedule for its eight-day literary festival, which takes place in several venues during October, on Tuesday. Eight-hundred and forty local and international authors will be reading and talking about books. Some of the notable authors scheduled to appear are former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, humorist Merrill Markoe, Kenyan exile Ngugi wa Thiong'o, mystery writer Zoe Ferraris, satirist Will Self, California poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, writer Michelle Tea, Zyzzyva editor Oscar Villalon, poet Matthew Zapruder, fantasist Karen Joy Fowler, comedian Michael Ian Black, essayist Rebecca Solnit, underground publisher Adam Parfrey, novelist Andrew Sean Greer, poet D.A. Powell, thriller writer David Corbett, actor Chris Elliott, novelist Joshua Mohr and Salon.com founder David Talbot.

The late journalist Anthony Shadid, Los Angeles writer Reyna Grande and the novelist Zadie Smith were among the finalists announced Monday for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards. Honors will be awarded in six categories: fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry and criticism. Shadid, who died last year while on assignment in Syria for the New York Times, was nominated in the autobiography category for his book “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East.” Grande was nominated in the same category for “The Distance Between Us,” the story of her childhood in Mexico and arrival as a girl in Los Angeles.

Once esteemed as the Oxford of East Africa, Makerere University is struggling to regain an academic prestige that was destroyed during the chaotic rule of dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s. The challenges faced by Uganda's only university have included replacing slain staff members, reassuring faculty who had fled into exile, renovating buildings neglected for a decade and reviving a school spirit shaken by repression and war.

On Monday, news started buzzing that Cormac McCarthy, chronicler of a blasted and violent early American West and, more recently, a dystopic frozen future, might be under consideration for the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose announcement is planned for Thursday. British wagering company Ladbrokes has tracked McCarthy's odds rising from 66-to-1 to 8-to-1. That makes him the highest-ranked American, unless you count Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who as I was typing moved from second place to first; wa Thiong'o has been a resident of the United States since his exile from Kenya in the late 1970s.

Presidents and wannabe presidents are supposed to read. A novel or a work of history under their arms makes them look, in a word, presidential. But just like the ties they wear, the book titles the candidates share with us are more than likely approved by image-conscious consultants. There's something suspicious, for example, about the list of favorite books on Barack Obama's Facebook page, which includes Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance," "Moby Dick," Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon," and Shakespeare's tragedies.

In her introduction to this collection of autobiographical essays by writers, most of whom first spoke a language other than English, editor Wendy Lesser cites Joseph Conrad as a prototype for those who come to write in a language different from their mother tongues. Conrad's feelings were certainly unequivocal: "I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it [writing in English] had always been an inherent part of myself.... [I]f I had not written in English I would not have written at all."

Words & Ideas Compiled by Grace Krilanovich. SUNDAY Joseph Mattson and James Greer : The authors of "Empty the Sun" and "The Failure," respectively, will read and sign their novels. Book Soup , 8818 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 6 p.m. Free. (310) 659-3110. Prison & Poets : A panel discussion featuring poets and activists Rafael F.J. Alvarado, Hugo Machuca, Luis Rodriguez, Hannah Wehr and A. Razor; moderated by poet S.A. Griffin. Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center , 681 Venice Blvd.

Only the bereaved can fully understand another person's loneliness. And, for a writer, next to losing a loved one, losing one's voice and perhaps one's country, too, makes for immeasurable grief. George Theiner, editor and translator, who died last week, knew this better than most. For 15 years, exiled from Czechoslovakia to Britain, he spent his hours doctoring the loneliness endured by writers who'd challenged the might of an authoritarian state.