Readers, authors, bloggers and book lovers flocked to Brooklyn's Borough Hall on Sunday, September 22, for the eighth annual Brooklyn Book Festival. The free, daylong celebration featured a schedule packed end-to-end with panel discussions, author readings and book signings; between events, attendees strolled through the hundreds of vendor booths that filled Borough Hall plaza. Brooklyn's own Greenlight Bookstore was among the local booksellers on hand to sell books by attending authors. (See our listing of other consumer book fairs across the country, which are as vibrant as the Brooklyn one, and are often sponsored by local bookstores.)
In a panel entitled "Creating Dangerously in a Dangerous World," authors Edwidge Danticat, Courtney Brkic and Dinaw Mengetsu discussed the difficulties of presenting legacies of political and personal trauma in fiction and nonfiction, and whether it is the responsibility of writers and artists to be politically engaged. Danticat's newest novel, Claire of the Sea Light (Knopf), focuses on a seven-year-old girl growing up in a poor, seaside town in Haiti.
In "Historical Secrets and Lies," Colombia's Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Argentina's Patricio Pron and South Africa's Zoë Wicomb talked about reexamining historical narratives and exposing lies passed down by previous generations. Juan Gabriel Vásquez's new novel, The Sound of Things Falling (Riverhead), sheds light on the private, personal effects of Colombia's drug wars, and in Pron's My Father's Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain (Knopf), a young Argentinian writer learns that his parents were part of an resistance movement against that country's dictatorship.
Festival-goers lined up around the block to see authors Karen Russell and A.M. Homes in a panel called "The Fantastic and the Strange." Russell read a portion of her short story "Reeling for the Empire," in which young women are transformed into silkworms during Japan's Meiji Restoration. The bizarre, eerie tale is part of Russell's new collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf). --Alex Mutter