Every year in the Chicago Journal offices since time immemorial (or at least since the summer of 2001), staffers have gathered to scrutinize the Printers Row Book Fair listings — sorry, it’s Printers Row Lit Fest now — and marked a few of the writers and readers that we think deserve extra attention.

Here are our can’t-miss-’em picks for this year’s festival:

Believe you’re about to be showered by riches or blessed with happiness, it will be so. Happy times are just around the corner if you squint hard enough to see them, no matter how bad things get. This ethic is deeply embedded in the American grain, but Barabara Ehrenrich take a contrarian stance against our seemingly ever-swelling power-of-positive-thinking culture in her latest book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

The title perhaps says it all. For Ehrenrich, who has previously examined the low-wage labor market (Nickel and Dimed) and the diminishing returns afforded by white-collar work (Bait and Switch), this seems like a natural topic.

She is scheduled to discuss the book with Rick Kogan at noon on June 12 in the Pritzker Auditorium in the Harold Washington Library.

Well, not exactly. But is it making us dumb? Magazine writer and author Nicholas Carr makes the case in his new book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

The book is in part an extension of a much-read essay called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that Carr published in The Atlantic two summers ago. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” Carr wrote then. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Joining the discussion are Tom Bissell, Jack Fuller and Owen Youngman on June 13 at 1 p.m. in room two of the Digital Lit stage at Federal and Polk.

Chicago-via-West Virginia author Glenn Taylor wowed the lit world when his first novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, was nominated for the esteemed National Book Critics Circle Award — a rare honor for a first-time author. Taylor’s sophomore effort, The Marrowbone Marble Company, is cut from the same cloth as his debut with its West Virginia setting and historical backdrops. But it’s a different beast altogether, abandoning Trenchmouth’s tall tale qualities to realistically follow a young man fresh from WWII who opens a glass marble factory in the Appalachian foothills and becomes wrapped strong in the 1960s civil rights struggle in the process. Taylor’s readings follow suit — past Chicago appearances saw the writer singing folk songs straight from the holler and relating uses for raccoon penis bones. Taylor will discuss his work, along with writers Steve Amick, Donald Lystra, Travis Nichols, in the Hotel Blake’s Burnham Room on Saturday at 1 p.m.

Finally, we’re intrigued by the “Define-A-Thon” scheduled for 2:15 on June 13 at the Center Stage of the festival. Do you know what sesquipedalian means?