Amid a publishing season that's offering a bumper harvest of great authors, the Texas Book Festival will be showcasing some of the cream of the crop.

Among those headed to Austin are the likes of Margaret Atwood, winner of the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin and author of the soon-to-be-released The Year of the Flood; Jeannette Walls, author of the best-selling memoir The Glass Castle and the forthcoming novel Half Broke Horses; and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Hell).

Also on the list unveiled Thursday: Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who will be discussing his memoir, Magnificent Desolation, and Pulitzer winner Taylor Branch, who will be releasing The Clinton Tapes .

The festival takes place Oct. 31 through Nov. 1 at the State Capitol. A gala on Oct. 30 will feature Pulitzer winner Richard Russo, author of the newly released That Old Cape Magic; Bryan Burrough (The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes); and a third, unannounced writer, with Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer serving as emcee.

San Antonio writer Rick Riordan will be honored with a Bookend Award for his Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. A typical festival weekend draws 35,000 people. That number helped festival literary director Clay Smith attract the impressive list of 216 writers, up from 190 last year, despite the bad economy. About 1,500 titles were considered.

"In a warped way, the recession is helping the festival," he said. "What publishers have realized is that it is smart to send their writers to a festival that has a well-proven track record of large crowds of people."

Julia Glass, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead and David Wroblewski are among the other well-known novelists scheduled.

And one panel will feature notable literary biographers: Blake Bailey ( Cheever: A Life) Tracy Daugherty (Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme), Brad Gooch (Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor ) and Brenda Wineapple (White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.)

Past festivals have sometimes been more political, reflecting publishing trends, Smith said. "It will be a different feel this year, because it's really literary fiction leading the pack."

Since its founding in 1995, the festival has made more than $2.3 million in grants to public libraries.