Hawai'i literati are abuzz about a new book from Random House — and it will be launched here in Honolulu at the second annual Hawaii Book & Music Festival.

Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of the well-received 2005 short-story collection "House of Thieves" and stepdaughter of Sen. Fred Hemmings, will be in town from San Francisco for the release of her debut novel, "The Descendants," on the Honolulu Hale grounds.

It's a sign that under executive director Roger Jellinek, the festival is kicking it up a notch.

"We didn't try to make it bigger, we tried to make it better," says Jellinek, a Honolulu-based literary agent and former deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review and editor-in-chief of The New York Times Company's book-publishing division.

At last year's inaugural two-day festival, 10,000 people browsed publishers' booths, took part in panel discussions on topics such as "What is the Great Hawaiian Novel?" and listened to visiting authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Lois-Ann Yamanaka.

"It was a remarkable success for a first-time festival," says Jellinek. Especially considering it was scheduled the same weekend as the Merrie Monarch Festival and Kokua Festival.

"We were really doing it with our hands tied," says Jellinek. "This time we don't have that kind of conflict."

While this year's event features roughly the same number of authors, storytellers and performers (350), with about a third of them returning, "there are many more big national authors this time," says Jellinek.

The Mission Memorial Auditorium will be the site of a series of major writers, many of whom, like Hemmings, will launch a book at the festival. The lineup includes Kingston, James Houston, young-adult novelist James Rumford and "Flags of Our Fathers" author James Bradley.

But the festival, is not just about big national names.

What sets the festival apart from its Mainland counterparts, says Jellinek, is that "we have a mix with music, but we also have a lot of drama — for kids and very much for grownups, oral storytelling."

Words could get interesting at 3 p.m. Saturday in the Hawaiian Culture Pavilion, when a panel of Hawaiian writers will discuss "Imagining Hawai'i Without Missionaries." Also on Saturday the cast of "Aging is for Sissies" will perform excerpts from the "Vagina Monologues"-meets-meno pause production at noon in the Storytelling Pavilion. Also scheduled are poetry slams, a discussion on extreme sports and a Harry Potter lookalike contest for keiki.

There is also an all-star lineup of local music, with performers such as Hapa, Na Leo and the Hall of Fame Serenaders. But the emphasis is clearly on books.

Island readership "is much bigger than most people realize. The ratio of bookstores to the population is pretty high," says Jellinek. "Hawai'i has the most vigorous self-publishing in the whole of the U.S. — one distributor has 225 publishing clients from Hawai'i. It's amazing because (self-publishing) actually works here. You couldn't do that anywhere else — actually make a living at it."

The festival is "a unique opportunity for book lovers, readers, people who create books, people who write them to all meet in one place under one roof," says Bennett Hymer, publisher of Mutual Publishing, which is participating in the event. "Other cities have festivals like this and they've all grown rapidly. It's been long overdue."

Reach Lesa Griffith at lgriffith@honoluluadvertiser.com.