The Village Voice preview the Brooklyn Book Festival, happening this weekend:
Three years in, the Brooklyn Book Festival is still a rigorously local event. Big names like Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead dot the 140-plus author lineup; there are discussions like “Brooklyn’s Place in History” and “Close-Up Brooklyn.” But organizers say that the success of the first two festivals has given them an opportunity to expand the scope of the third—to make it, in the words of Carolyn Greer of the borough president’s office, a “destination” event.
“In 2006, we wanted to crystallize and catalyze this burgeoning literary scene,” says Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books and chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, which helps organize the festival. The first year featured a short list of local literati, including Whitehead and Lethem, and roughly 100 exhibitors, like indie publishers Soft Skull and Seven Stories, most of them based in the New York area.
This year, Temple says, the organizers have looked further afield, bringing in authors and publishers from all corners of the globe and across a spectrum of genres. Among the names on this year’s roster: Marina Temkina, a Russian poet and activist; the Angolan journalist José Eduardo Agualusa; Binyavanga Wainaina, a short-story writer from Kenya; journalist and essayist Pico Iyer of England; novelist Patrice Nganang of Cameroon; and Linn Ullmann, a Norwegian journalist and writer.
Of course, for many Brooklynites, the international aura is already omnipresent. “I’ve spent a lot of my life in the Bay Area,” says [Adrian] Tomine, author of the graphic novel Shortcomings and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, “and Brooklyn still feels like the most diverse place I’ve ever lived.” Adds [John] Wray: “Brooklyn always had an international aspect to it—think about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and the picture it paints of immigrant life in Brooklyn. These days, yeah, that international quality has more pull, more glamour.”
Ironically, Temple says, he’s had trouble convincing friends that the festival can actually go wide-angle, so deeply entrenched is the concept of Brooklyn as the domain of Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer. “People have a hard time disengaging from [it],” he says, “which is a little frustrating for us, because we should be able to have a strong Brooklyn flavor without people thinking that everything has to be Brooklyn-focused. When I explain it, it feels very straightforward, but every day someone says: ‘I see so-and-so on your list. I thought it was just Brooklyn authors.’ Really? You want me to e-mail you the 75 non-Brooklyn authors on the list?”
Related: Tao Lin, reading tonight at WORD.
First posted: Wednesday, September 10th, 2008.
