Kristin Henderson reads a story with her son Griffin at a previous Brooklyn Book Fest (Photo: Meghan White)
Great news! Brooklyn Book Fest has now updated its website to include a comprehensive event calendar for the imminent 2014 fest, which means we at B+B are able to supplement our recent rundown of upcoming literary shindigs.
The lineup for the main event, held on Sunday, Sept. 21, is extensive, and you can check it out online. But allow us to highlight a couple of choice offerings:
- Science and Speculation will feature a conversation between international authors Naja Marie Aidt (Baboon), Lauren Beukes (Broken Monsters, Zoo City), and Deji Olukotun (Nigerians in Space), whose combined works span Denmark, Detroit, Nigeria and South Africa. They’ll be in conversation with Laura Miller of Salon.
- This Changes Everything: A Conversation with Naomi Klein, presented by The Nation: Naomi Klein, author, activist and frequent contributor to The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The Nation, has written her first book in seven years. And it tackles a fairly weighty subject. In This Changes Everything, Klein refutes climate change deniers and highlights the connection between consumerism and climate change, arguing that decreasing emissions will also allow us to tackle inequality. Klein will be in conversation with The Nation’s executive editor, Betsy Reid.
- Who? New! gives you a chance to hear from some of the year’s hottest debut novelists before they blow up and become Jonathan Franzen or whatever. Catherine Lacy (Nobody is Ever Missing), Sharona Muir (Invisible Beasts), Kimberly Elkins (What Is Visible), Raj Karamchedu (All Things Unforgiven), and Mike Meginnis (Fat Man and Little Boy) will all be reading from their work.
- 21st Century Narrators presented by the London Review of Books: This is for anyone who recently read The Goldfinch and now wants to talk incessantly about modes of narration to anyone who will listen. Here’s an event where you can pay attention to smarter people doing the same. LRB contributors Elif Batuman (author of The Possessed, and the New Yorker’s lady in Istanbul), Christine Smallwood (Harper’s columnist) and Lorin Stein (editor of The Paris Review) will discuss new types of narration—or if there even is such a thing. LRB senior editor Christian Lorentzen will moderate.
- On a similar note, if we’re talking trustworthiness, is Fact Finders and Fact Fakers, which explores the depiction of journalism in fictional realism by authors with experience of the industry. Lorraine Adams (a former journalist herself, and author of The Room and the Chair), Salar Abdoh (Tehran at Twilight), and Boris Fishman (author of A Replacement Life and formerly of the New Yorker) talk truth and lies in journalism and fiction. Their conversation will be moderated by Julia Dahl (Invisible City).
- It’s the Little Things that Count will put Annie Baker (The Flick), Owen Egerton (How Best To Avoid Dying), Sam Lipsyte (The Fun Parts) and Rivka Galchen (American Innovations) in a room, to talk about the tiny details that pile up in the mundane and dark lives they portray. Dark humor, surrealism, and heartbreak abound in their realistic visions of quotidian events. Moderated by Rob Spillman of Tin House.
- Thurston Moore in Conversation with Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman will find the Sonic Youth maestro reprising the sit-down he had with East Village poet Anne Waldman, though this one is likely to be less Burroughs focused.
- In How to Write About a City, a collection of writers who excel at evoking urban spaces will tell you how to do the same. Phillip Lopate (ed. Writing New York: A Literary Anthology), Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America) and Edmund White (Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris) will participate in a discussion moderated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Leaving Brooklyn).
- Imprisonment. Three words: Joyce Carol Oates. Simply the name of this prolific author should be enough to draw you in. But there’ll be other people too, and they’ll be talking literal and metaphorical prisons in literature.
- The Writer’s Life—that glamorous, mysterious thing—will be the topic of discussion between Salman Rushdie (Joseph Anton etc., whose writerly life is occasionally imperilled), Siri Hustvedt (The Blazing World), and Catherine Lacey (Nobody is Ever Missing). Each writer is at a remarkably different point in their life and career, and each will read from their work and speak about the way that writing happens for them, day to day. The discussion will be moderated by Steph Opitz, of the Texas Book Festival.
There’s much more where that came from online—truly, it is an embarrassment of riches (there’s even an entire children/youth section if you happen to have those. I don’t, so I ignored those ones, but I’m sure they’d be quite fun. And there’s also Zadie Smith! Who I cruelly ignored, because no one else will). And the full roundup of Bookend events is also now available.
Go forth and spread the love of literature, o logophiles!