[FIPS WAS THERE...] Brooklyn Book Festival

Image via tinhouse.comOkay, so there’s something innately awkward and irritating about convention-style booths.  Are you obligated to make small talk with the guy behind the table before taking a pen?  Are those free-looking gifts really free?  Is it okay to throw away all the brochures you collected as soon as you get home or do you have to shove them in your junk drawer for six months first? 

Inherent conference issues aside, Sunday’s Brooklyn Book Festival was a gorgeous success.  Over 200 booths were scattered around Borough Hall and Columbus Park.  There were booths for literary magazines (Tin House, The Paris Review, A Public Space), booths for small presses (Bellevue Literary Press, Soho Press), booths for bookstores (the Strand, the Community Bookstore, powerHouse Arena), and booths for industrious, self-promoting authors (Theresa Varela, Pink Maxwell, Rosemary Harris). 

Inside Borough Hall, various civic rooms were devoted to workshops, lectures, signings, and Q&As.  There were panels with catchy names (Love, Villainy, Ethics, and Karaoke: Chuck Klosterman & Rob Sheffield in Conversation), panels with catchy authors (Chang-Rae Lee, Nick Flynn, Susan Choi, Phillip Lopate, Edwidge Danticat, Francine Prose, Karen Russell, A. M. Homes), and panels devoted to genre geeks (The Future: Big New Books in Comics Sci-Fi).  There was even something called “Purple Reign: The Legacy and Significance of Prince.”  Who doesn’t want to spend the first day of fall pondering that?

Children were more than welcome (Target sponsored a Children’s Area), and story-time lasted all day long.  I was lucky enough to catch the elegant Donald Crews read his beloved children’s book Freight Train (if you are a PS Breeder, you are familiar…) and reminisce about the trips to Grandma’s house that inspired it.  Older children had the “Youth Stoop” and panels of their own.

This year’s Best of Brooklyn Inc. Award (“bestowed each year on an author whose body of work exemplifies or speaks to the spirit of Brooklyn”) was given to the great Lois Lowry (Number the Stars, The Giver, and my personal favorite, Anastasia Krupnik).  She was honored at the St. Francis College Auditorium across the street from Borough Hall.

The weather put on a real show, summertime warm until 4:44 PM, at which point the seasons officially changed and a crisp writerly breeze blew through the streets.  Artists roamed, but official sponsor AT&T countered the pretension.  Borough Hall looked dapper in the sun, its grand stairs serving as a kind of raked theatre.  And festival volunteers donned deep orange t-shirts that made them delightfully easy to spot.  All in all, it was the kind of lovely day that makes this FIPS writer think, “Just why, exactly, are we so Fucked?”