Inprint, recently revealed the 31st season of its acclaimed Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, and Marilyn Jones, Inprint’s associate director, has detected an accidental theme in the 2011-2012 season.

Each year Inprint brings to town some of the most celebrated fiction writers and poets of our time to read and discuss their work, and this season it's an eclectic literary lineup of well-known award winners along with some important up-and-comers under 40. The schedule includes two Booker Prize winners, three Pulitzer Prize winners and a National Book Award winner who is also the current U.S Poet Laureate.

Many factors go into creating each season’s schedule, but occasionally a pattern or theme that ties some of the works together begins to emerge. Inprint director Rich Levy notes, “It does happen sometimes and we don’t even know why it happens, but it’s usually accidental . . . I think it’s cultural trends.

"I think cultural trends run through the work because writers are writing about themselves and the world around them. Themes kind of naturally emerge.”

So what unintentional theme does Marilyn Jones find in this season’s group of prize-winning novelists? “If there’s a theme for this year’s fiction, it would have to be somewhat autobiographical threads in the stories,” she says. “This is the time when memoir is really big in our culture.”

This theme begins with the very first reading on September 19 with Francisco Goldman and his latest novel Say Her Name, which Levy describes as a “Thinly disguised memoir.” The book recounts the death of his wife, writer Aura Estrada, and his mourning of her.

Paired with Goldman will be author Nicole Krauss reading from her latest novel Great House, a 2010 National Book Award finalist. Krauss is also one of the under-40 authors of the season.

When I asked Marilyn Jones when and how authors and poets are paired on stage she said it is sometimes a scheduling decision or a need to have two authors read when there might not be enough public knowledge about one, but they strive to pair authors together who will have “interesting chemistry.”

She explains “You want them to curious about each others’ work, but you don’t want them to duplicate each other.”

The autobiographic threads continues when Booker Prize winning author of The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, comes to town to read from his novel Cat’s Table, the story of a 11-year-old boy’s adventures on a ship from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England. When Ondaatje was 11, he made a lone ship voyage from Ceylon to join his mother in England.

Jones says “I’m sure there’s a lot of imagination in it but there’s some basic things that happened in his life that are similar to what happens to the character.” She thinks, “This is the voyage he wishes he took.”

In October, Inprint becomes a kind of literary farmers market, bringing the freshest of fiction to Houston, as Ondaatje takes the stage of Moores Opera House on Oct. 10 just a week after Cat’s Table is released and then Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides hits Wortham’s Cullen Theater on the 26th to read from The Marriage Plot, a novel which will be released only a few weeks before his appearance.

Eugenides is the author of The Virgin Suicides. The recent Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman movie The Switch is loosely based his short story “The Baster.”

Jones says of Marriage Plot: “In some ways you can think of it as a Jane Austen story sent in contemporary times which means it has drugs, it has sex; it has life issues that we’re all facing ...”

Icons in the New Year

After a busy October, the series takes a little break until January 23, 2012, when Inprint brings literary legend Margaret Atwood to the Cullen Theater. The prolific and multi-award-winning writer’s more recent novels have been Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, two parts of her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy.

It’s a little too early to know what exactly Atwood will read, but if she’s at work on the third book there is a chance she could give the H-town audience a sneak peek.

February 27, 2012 bring poets Rae Armantrout and Christian Wiman to the Alley Theatre. Speaking about Pulitzer Prize winning Armantrout’s latest book of poetry Money Shots, Levy says, “She’s writing about how capitalism informs so much of what we do . . . Not a lot of poets write about money. Maybe because they don’t have any.”

Levy says of Christian Wiman, who is also an essayist and the editor of Poetry: “He’s a poet who’s really interested in spiritual issues. You almost could say he’s a Christian poet, but maybe that’s a little dangerous.”

Téa Obreht & Gary Shteyngart round out the fiction writers on March 26, 2012 at Cullen Theater. Jones says the 26-year-old Obreht’s debut novel The Tiger’s Wife is another example of the autobiographic theme of the season.

While the plot of Tiger’s Wife has very few similarities to Obreht’s life, the setting and the relationship between the protagonist and her story-telling grandfather do seem to echo some of Obreht’s past.

Of the choice to invite such a new writer to the series, Jones says, “We were a little wary because it was a debut novel of someone very young.”

Jones notes all the “heaped on accolades” the book has garnered since it was published. “Once it was published and we were able to read it we said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ She’s of the caliber of people who have been writing a long time. She’s unusual.”

Obreht is paired with Gary Shteyngart, another writer under 40, who Jones describes as “Edgy and sassy,” and a writer who might appeal to younger generations. Ironically, his latest novel Super Sad True Love Story, a very funny dystopian novel, is a work with almost no autobiographic elements. Readers wanting to get a taste of Shteyngart’s sense of humor might want to view the hilarious trailers for the book, as his “roommate” Paul Giamatti cruises book clubs to pick up cougars in one and his student James Franco teaches him to read in another.

The 31st season ends with the current U.S. Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin. Merwin has won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize twice. Levy say his poetry is “Rich and very profound. Never inaccessible.”

Attending the Merwin reading on April 23, 2012 at the Alley Theatre should be the perfect way to celebrate National Poetry Month.