AUSTIN Gore Vidal the inimitable raconteur, essayist, novelist, playwright, historian, critic, and screenwriter will be in Austin on Sunday, Oct. 29, from 2-3 p.m., at the Paramount Theatre, where he will be in public conversation with Maureen Dowd.

On Nov. 7, Vidal’s new book, “Point to Point Navigation, A Memoir from 1964 to 2006,” will be available to the public. Published by Doubleday, the memoir is a sequel to his acclaimed, bestselling “Palimpsest.”

Although Vidal will not be able to sign books following Sunday’s event as he will have to rush off to catch a plane back to Los Angeles, people can advance purchase copies of the new memoir with a signed bookplate.

Noted in several venues, from literature to politics to entertainment, Vidal is considered an American icon.

In “Point to Point,” Vidal ranges freely over his life experiences with the signature wit and literary elegance that is uniquely his.

The title refers to a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the Navy during World War II.

He says, “As I was writing this account of my life and times since “Palimpsest,” I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.”

From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Vidal, in “Point to Point,” travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics, and international society where he has cut a broad swath. Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages are Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Greta Garbo, Paul Newman, Johnny Carson, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Princess Margaret, Elia Kazan, Francis Ford Coppola, Grace Kelly, Paul Bowles