The Durango Public Library has come to be known for the authors it brings in for its annual literary festival (Jennifer Weiner was here in 2016), and this year is no different. On Thursday, best-selling author Justin Cronin will be at the library to give a presentation and sign books afterward.

Cronin, perhaps best known for his dark, apocalyptic “The Passage” trilogy, is a PEN/Hemingway Award and Stephen Crane Prize winner for his novel, Mary and O’Neil.

In a recent phone interview, I had a chance to pick Cronin’s brain about the popularity of literary festivals, if he thinks people are still reading for fun and what books he likes to read.

Q: You’ve spoken at quite a few literary festivals. Why do you think they’re so important?

A: Because they’re all about books – it’s the same question: Why are books important? The culture of literary festivals continues to grow, and it’s really big elsewhere in the world.

I do tours in Europe sometimes and Australia and places like that; it’s all about the literary festival, so they get a lot of writers and a lot of readers in the same place. And that’s really what they do: The purpose of the festival is to get a bunch of writers and a bunch of readers all together to some extent, in the same room. And it helps people find the books they want to read, and it helps give writers a sense of who their audience is, and a chance to hang out with the readers. It gives writers the chance to hang out with other writers, too, which is a nice kind of collateral benefit. Writing and reading are naturally solitary activities – you read by yourself and you write by yourself – and it’s endemic to what a book is, but it’s also nice to come out of that totally private space whether as a writer or a reader to be with others like yourself.

Q: Are crowds usually pretty big or have you seen a decline?

A: I’ve been to a lot that are really quite big, and there are ones that are smaller. It really depends on geography and time of year. The Texas Book Festival is the biggest book festival in the country, and it takes over Austin, Texas, for five days. The Miami Book Festival is huge, the Boston Book Festival, which I’ve done a couple of times, is really big. The biggest book festival I’ve ever seen was Brisbane, Australia. I was there last fall, and you would have thought, based on the signage, that it was the World Expo or something. Literally, every sign post and every light post in the city had a banner for the book festival. It was really impressive.

Q: Do you think that reflects the fact that people are still reading for fun?

A: I think people are still reading for fun. The death of the book has been predicted again and again, and I’ve got news for you: The book will be at all of our funerals. It’s a perfect product: It’s more entertainment per dollar than anything – movies are $15 and last two hours, a book is $15 and lasts two weeks. I don’t have sales figures in front of me, I can’t say, “This many books sell,” and it’s seasonal, and election years, people buy fewer books – there are all kinds of complicated algorithms that the publishing industry is aware of that I am not, but I’m a reader, everybody else I know is a reader, I go to book events, I go on tour – I go to a bookstore in, you know, Denver, and there’s a lot of people there.

Social media, I think, is how people find books and have sort of active reading lives, not just the finding and reading of books, but also talking to other people, whether they’re strangers online or people in their book club, to talk about books and engage with them.

I feel like we have a very strong living literary culture, despite all the dire predictions. And I actually think the real reason for this is the creation of YA (young adult) as a literary category, which didn’t exist when I was a kid. My daughter grew up in the era of Harry Potter, which kind of created the modern YA as we look at it as a publishing category.

I’m teaching a class this semester at Rice where I used to be a full-time professor, now I’m teaching one class a year, and all of my students ... were all born about the same year that (the first) Harry Potter was published. And so they grew up swimming in this current of everything: Harry Potter, Hunger Games, all of it. And so there was a ton of these kids growing up, and they’re all extremely literate and, of course, they still love those books and they’ve all moved on to more grown-up fare. But I think that the growth of YA has created this generation of readers that we’re now just beginning to see … they are the first Harry Potter generation, and they read.

Q: So what are you reading right now?

A: An odd assemblage of things – I’m grazing. (Laughing) I tell people that I’m almost done with my binge reading of male midlife-crisis novels, which is a real genre, I assure you. Usually involves all sorts of self-inflicted humiliation.

Q: What’s your all-time favorite book?

A: Oh, that’s like asking a dog what his favorite smell is. (Laughs) All of them.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: That’s still sort of under wraps. After publishing the third book of the trilogy and then a really long period of travel, things are finally settling down a little bit, and I’m trying to get a new project off the ground.

katie@durangoherald.com

If you go

What: Durango Public Library Literary Festival featuring author Justin Cronin.

When: The evening will begin with a reception at 5:30 p.m. Thursday. Cronin will give a presentation at 7, and will be available to sign books after.

Where: Durango Public Library, 1900 East Third Ave.

More information: Food and drinks will be served, and Maria’s Bookshop will be selling Cronin’s books in the library.