Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Three telltale signs of fall: the leaves are turning; the wind has acquired a bite; and hordes of people can be seen swarming Toronto’s Harbourfront complex with hardcover volumes wedged under their arms. That’s right, it’s authors fest season.

Easily one of the most important reading events in the world, Toronto’s International Festival of Authors (Oct. 19-29) always draws a luminous roster of storytellers. But while it used to be the domain of staunchly “literary” authors — i.e., writers of self-consciously important, socially redeeming books — the IFOA has recently come to embrace genre fiction and forms that, in the past, might have been judged too lowbrow for an authors festival. In broadening the scope of the IFOA, programmers have made an already world-class event even more interesting. Here, a cross-section of this year’s talent.

The buzz authors
This year’s must-have ticket is a toss-up: Jonathan Safran Foer or Zadie Smith. These two upstarts have been exalted and excoriated in equal measure. My theory for the backlash: nothing frosts a hardened reviewer (slash frustrated author) more than raw talent, which these two have in excess. Foer’s still-modest oeuvre — Everything is Illuminated (2002) and this year’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close — is a disarming blend of metafictional derring-do and childlike awe; nobody writes quite like him. Of the two novels, the latter — about a nine-year-old boy coming to grips with his father’s death in the World Trade Center attacks — is the more emotionally devastating.

Zadie Smith. Photo AP Photo/Sergio Dionisio

As for Smith, she’s become a paradigm for a new type of BritLit: confident, class-conscious, unabashedly multi-culti. Smith favours more conventional narratives than her New York counterpart, but they’re no less impressive in their execution. Her 2000 debut, White Teeth, was a generational saga reminiscent of Salman Rushdie; her latest, On Beauty, is equally imposing, as evidenced by her shortlist nomination for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

Zadies in waiting
Smith’s swift ascent to literary eminence has prompted savvy publishers to mark any Brit female with youth, verve and a non-Anglo-Saxon outlook as “the new Zadie Smith.” As a branding exercise, it’s somewhat specious; all the same, it snares your attention. This year’s fest features two beneficiaries of that dubious tag: Diana Evans and Helen Oyeyemi. The former is the author of 26A, the Orange Prize-winning novel about Georgia and Bessi, two British-Nigerian twins; the latter was a dewy 19 when she wrote her debut, The Icarus Girl, a slightly surreal narrative about a forlorn eight-year-old Londoner who makes an ethereal friend when her family moves to Nigeria. In what could only be a coincidence, Smith, Evans and Oyeyemi are reading together on the same night (Friday, Oct. 21).

The award hopefuls
IFOA always falls in the thick of CanLit award season, which inevitably means representation from contenders for the Giller Prize and Governor General’s Award for fiction. This year’s fest features Winnipegger David Bergen (The Time in Between) and Torontonian David Gilmour (A Perfect Night to Go to China), as well as East Coaster Lisa Moore (Alligator), all reading from their nominated titles.

Sass and the city

Candace Bushnell. Courtesy H. B. Fenn

Snooty critics often scoff at chicklit novels for their lightness of tone, but as a genre, they’re hard to ignore. They sell phenomenally, and if done well, can provide both the frisson of a ripe piece of gossip and a meditation on class. This year’s fest features a couple of chicklit progenitors, Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City) and Melissa Bank (A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing), as well as Lauren Weisberger, the author of The Devil Wears Prada, her not-so-subtle takedown of Vogue editrix Anna Wintour. They all have new books: Bushnell will navigate her Lipstick Jungle, Bank delves into The Wonder Spot and Weisberger introduces audiences to Everyone Worth Knowing. Rumour and innuendo are sure to fly — off the pages.

The populist
Had we heard the name Elizabeth Kostova a year ago, we might have assumed her to be some Russian figure-skating phenom. A year later, we know better. Kostova is the American author of The Historian, this summer’s publishing triumph. Reminiscent of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and indebted to the conspiracy-lit vogue inspired by The Da Vinci Code, Kostova’s tale of the elusive undead is everything you’d hope for in a page-turner: it’s smart, suspenseful, contains ghoulish beasties and has the heft of an anvil — which means lots of pages to turn.

’Toons for our times

Seth. Courtesy Raincoast Books

Graphic novels now get reviewed on the same high-minded pages in newspapers as more traditional tomes, a fact that should silence any debate about their literary worth. This year, IFOA hosts two of the very best in the field. Chris Ware is the Chicago-based scribbler responsible for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), a graphic novel that showed many non-believers that a so-called “comic” could hit all the emotional triggers of a conventional novel. Seth is the Guelph, Ont.-based cartoonist/illustrator responsible for last year’s Clyde Fans (Book 1); he also currently has an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario (on until Oct. 23). These two have done immeasurable work in legitimizing panel-based narratives as high art — all without robbing the medium of its essential pleasures. Both bring new works to IFOA: Seth will expound on Wimbledon Green, while Ware reads from The ACME Novelty Library.

Old faithfuls
Call them “the perennials,” “the evergreens” or some other gardening term. However you refer to them, it’s fair to say no self-respecting authors fest would feel whole without them: scribes like John Irving, Julian Barnes and Francine Prose have withstood the often soul-crushing course of a fiction career and continue to write books that are challenging, playful and pertinent. Always an engaging speaker, Irving is in town to read from the contentious Until I Find You, a stout novel that contains all manner of see-through clues about Irving’s agonized upbringing. Meanwhile, Barnes, the consummate English satirist, recites from the Man Booker-nominated Arthur & George, a trenchant class study of two 19th-century blokes — one of whom becomes a world-renowned crime writer. The inexhaustible Francine Prose actually has two new works out this year — a novel and an artist biography (Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles). She’ll be in Toronto to illuminate A Changed Man, another corrosive dramedy, this one about a neo-Nazi who seeks salvation by joining an anti-racism group.

Stay tuned for CBC Arts Online’s upcoming interviews with a number of IFOA authors.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.