Despite upped admission fees and downsized programming -- no more international pavilions, no more kick-off parade -- Miami Book Fair International pledges to bring some 300 authors to South Florida this fall for its 26th edition.

And, as always, the lineup for the week-long festival that begins Nov. 8 surely will prove an irresistible lure to hundreds of thousands of South Floridians who live and breathe literature.

The fair opens with the hugely entertaining novelist, poet and essayist Margaret Atwood, who will talk about her new comic dystopian nightmare The Year of the Flood, and poet Elizabeth Alexander, whose Praise Song for the Day (``Each day we go about our business . . .'') resonated at Barack Obama's inauguration.

Other ``Evenings with . . . '' speakers include Barbara Kingsolver, who sets The Lacuna, her first novel in nine years, in Mexico in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, and memoirist Jeannette Walls, who follows her bestselling The Glass Castle, with Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, based on Wall's grandmother who lived as a child in a dirt dugout in West Texas. Another slot will be occupied by Richard Powers, whose previous novel The Echo Maker won the National Book Award and was a Pulitzer finalist. Powers will appear on behalf of Generosity: An Enhancement, a novel about a reluctant creative-writing teacher whose life becomes complicated when an Algerian woman of preternatural happiness enrolls in his class. And Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk will lead a tour of The Museum of Innocence, a love story set in modern Istanbul, from the Westernized opulence of its hip neighborhoods to its poor back streets.

Other authors' names leap out, too: Former vice president Al Gore picks up where An Inconvenient Truth left off with Our Choice, his blueprint for solving the climate crisis, and TV's Dr. Sanjay Gupta offers a valuable lesson or two about medical miracles in Cheating Death. Brad Gooch will host a visit with Flannery (O'Connor), and memoirist Mary Karr examines her darkly hilarious conversion story in Lit.

South Florida poet Mia Leonin tries her hand at prose with Havana and Other Missing Fathers, while Jennine Capo Crucet, a fair newcomer, ponders How to Leave Hialeah. Even the hilarious Larry Wilmore of The Daily Show gets in on the act with I'd Rather We Got Casinos and Other Black Thoughts, and South Florida resident Iggy Pop relives punk's heyday in The Stooges.

Although Miami Book Fair International is the big show in town, it's not the only one. The Dave and Mary Alper Jewish Community Center in Southwest Miami-Dade kicks off its 29th annual Book Festival on Oct. 22 with Carol Leifer and When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win, while, two days earlier in Davie, the David Posnack Jewish Community Center's festival opens with Susie Fishbein and Kosher by Design Lightens Up: Fabulous Food for a Healthier Lifestyle.

Conveniently for book lovers who don't want to spend their spare time tearing up and down I-95, the fairs share a few authors. The always-genial Chris Bohjalian will appear at both events to discuss his harrowing Skeletons at the Feast, a novel about the westward exodus of East Germans at the end of World War II as Russian troops swarm after them. And Jeffrey Zaslow, author of bestselling The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship and the upcoming Highest Duty: Capt. Chesley ``Sully'' Sullenberger, will also chat about . . . friendship and duty, maybe? Can't get any more fair than that.

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