Brooklyn Gets Booked

Brooklyn is tailored to meet the needs of its residents. Commuters can gain access to 10 trains running out of the Atlantic/Pacific Station, and kickball enthusiasts can play in a league in McCarren Park beyond the age of 14 and not be judged—at least not by their teammates—as being juvenile. If the state of Virginia hadn’t already laid out that Virginia is for lovers, Brooklyn might snag that, too—hello, shady corners of Prospect Park! But on Sept. 14, Brooklyn will be for readers, as the Brooklyn Book Festival, a celebration of the four-eyed, nerdy notables who call the great borough home, rolls into its third year.

The festival began in 2006, and Johnny Temple, council chair of the festival and head of this year’s fiction programming, credits the start in large part to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. Temple, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the independent, Brooklyn-based Akashic Books was one of the festival’s creators. “I’ve always thought that Brooklyn should have a book festival,” he says. The idea for the festival found a receptive ear in Markowitz, who brought the project to fruition. “He has shepherded this into being,” Temple adds. The third annual festival looks to continue the community vibe of those past, bringing national and international authors to its panels and readings while maintaining “a distinctly Brooklyn flavor,” Temple says, by keeping things “hip, smart and diverse.”

This year’s festival brings 150 authors to its indoor and outdoor stages—which are in and around Borough Hall in Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn—presenting programs in fiction, non-fiction, poetry and youth literature. “We have programs for book junkies, the recluses, the hipsters, the young and the old,” Temple boasts. Authors from around the globe will take to the stages, as well as local favorites, like Joan Didion, Chuck Klosterman, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen and Charles Bock.

Bock, a Las Vegas native and New York resident since his mid-20s, is attending the festival for the first time. “Usually I’ve been working on something,” Bock says, explaining why he’s never made it to the event before. “I’m not the most social person in the world.” Bock resides in Manhattan, but he looks at Brooklyn as a place that, with its recent habit of exploding and changing in all sorts of ways, both good and bad, is an ideal home for this festival. “No one can deny there’s a tremendous pulse there,” he said. Bock, author of this year’s Beautiful Children, is slated to read with Ed Park and Klosterman, both of whom he sheepishly admitted to admiring. “I own the first edition of [Klosterman’s] Fargo Rock City,” he confides.

The festival certainly is bringing out the literary stars, but unlike the fans of music and film legends, Bock says that few writers today have fans that exhibit total, non-skeptical enthusiasm for the printed word. When Beautiful Children first came out, it received a lot of positive attention, but Bock admits that many of the readers who came out to meet him were more set on seeing if he was worth the fuss than to praise him as a literary celebrity. The attendees at readings came “wanting to challenge me,” Bock says, “and see if I deserved [the attention].”

Temple agrees that one of the best parts of the literary industry is that it’s the readers who elevate authors to a level of recognition, which is achieved through real talent. “It’s refreshing to be in the publishing business, because celebrity is driven by [an author’s] writing and what they produce.” And without the readers to keep the interest alive, authors might as well be writing books for themselves.

“Readers are valued to no end,” Bock says. “It’s hard to get them, hard to keep them, hard to hold their attention spans.” The festival should have no trouble holding the attention of even the most easily distracted audience members, with all of its offerings compiled into one eight-hour, tightly scheduled day.

Aside from the readings and panels, festival attendees may also check out booths from various local literary businesses. Christine Onorati’s Word, an independent bookstore in Greenpoint, will be among the booth crowd. “Owning an independent bookstore is often challenging,” she says with a laugh. Onorati is a grounded optimist: She feels hopeful for her business’s future but is fully aware that, “No one opens an independent bookstore to become a millionaire.” Word’s booth will have books available for sale, and readers can also purchase books directly from Brooklyn-based publishers, like Akashic, which gives them the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with supporting a community venture.

At a past Brooklyn Book Festival, Markowitz touted Brooklyn as the “epicenter of the literary life” of the nation, which might’ve led some to view Brooklyn as an elitist borough for writers, but Temple frankly disagrees. “Brooklyn is the place writers go when they can’t afford to live in Manhattan,” he explains, citing Markowitz’s position on embracing the event as evidence that something beyond proximity to Manhattan draws the writers to dwell there. “An elected official is sponsoring the borough’s big cultural event,” Temple says. “It’s the total opposite of elitist.”