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Downtown Brooklyn Besieged By Books
Choosing the best of the annual Brooklyn Book Festival
John Updike
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For those who spend their time alone with books, meeting like-minded fans of reading and writing can be a challenge. Literary festivals provide a rare opportunity to share this enthusiasm. And more so each year, the Brooklyn Book Festival seeks to attract all factions of word-hounds to downtown Brooklyn.
Not just mainstream literature’s day, the Brooklyn Brook Festival invites songwriters like Thurston Moore to discuss their influence on literature and Marvel comic writers to talk about crafting superhero tales, not forgetting romance and food writers, young adult and child readers. With the number of authors in the metropolitan area, not to mention the subsequent connections to writers elsewhere, the Brooklyn Book Festival turns out an overwhelming amount of talent. And it’s free. If only it lasted longer than seven hours.
September 13: One day, 75 panels. The hardest part of attending such a huge festival is choosing what to see. You could follow your preferred genre, be it fiction, nonfiction, food writing, political works, or children’s literature. But part of the excitement is discovering a new author whose wit or works move your sensibilities. For this reason, the best strategy is to wander. We can only offer the following suggestions, a rough sketch of how we will spend our day.
10 a.m.: Don’t miss the incredible Salon book critic Laura Miller contemplating The Legacies of John Updike and David Foster Wallace with Lev Grossman (Time) and David Ulin (Los Angeles Times).
11 a.m.: To a devoted minority, the short story still expresses a tale better than any novel or novella could. Hear Joan Silber, A.M. Homes and Jeffrey Renard Allen, three proponents and masters of the form, praise its delicate heights at Short Stories Stand Tall.
12 p.m.: Culture guru Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) discusses The Great Recession with Justin Fox and Kai Wright.
OR:
At Believe it or Not, the New Yorker’s unmatchable financial writer James Surowiecki moderates reporters who cover cults and Madoff schemes, telling true tales that read stranger than fiction.
1 p.m.: Only the Dead airs the best of Brooklyn’s most famed wordsmiths, those whose end did not inhibit their stories from continuing on, from Walt Whitman to Frank McCourt. Performed by actors from Troupe.
OR:
Selected readings from Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, a publication by the demiurgic Tin House. Rasskazy highlights the best current literature from post-Soviet Russia, a country producing consistently good stories.
2 p.m.: Three memoirists, Brad Kessler, Staceyann China and Sarah Manguso talk about Life Stories, or translating the confusion of life into a tale with clarity. Moderated by Brigid Hughes, editor of the groundbreaking literary journal A Public Space.
3 p.m.: This panel contains the most rock star writers. See readings from Russell Banks (Cloudsplitter, The Reserve), Francine Prose (Blue Angel, Reading Like a Writer) and Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, The Brooklyn Follies) at Literary Masters.
5 p.m.: Poets & Writers Magazine offers hope to struggling writers everywhere. Who better to answer the question “Why Poetry Now?” than the publication’s editorial director, Mary Gannon, with readings from some poets who prove their worth.