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| At the opening night party, festival director Cherilyn Parsons flanked by City Lights' Paul Yamazaki (r.) and Yale University Press' Steve Wasserman (l.), talking to Berkeley pal Steve Silberstein. | |
Books took over downtown Berkeley, Calif., this weekend as the first Bay Area Book Festival commandeered a 10-block area to welcome 300 authors for 145 events that included keynotes, interviews, panel discussions and performances. At the elegant kick-off party held Friday night in the club atop the University of California's Stadium, Cherilyn Parsons, the festival's founder and executive director, thanked the sponsors, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the University, the City of Berkeley, Ingram Spark, Perseus, HarperOne, Scribd, Chronicle Books and Goodreads. All book sales were handled by Bay Area independent booksellers.
The events were free, but tickets were issued for crowd control; the sessions, ranging in topic from the "Roots of Violence" to "A Showcase of Latin American Stories with Daniel Alarcón," were packed. Speaker headliners included Judy Blume, Google's Laszlo Bock, Daniel Handler, Pico Iyer, Peter Coyote and Rebecca Solnit.
On Sunday morning, attendees were still talking about the previous day's publishing panel at which David Streitfeld from the New York Times was booed when he said there were only two bookstores left in San Francisco. Attendees made sure the record was set straight: the Bay Area has one of the most thriving bookselling communities in the country.
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| Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman and Kelly Corrigan. | |
Author Kelly Corrigan interviewed Berkeley's literary power couple, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, on the main stage. "He always makes us sit in the same place as our side of the bed," Waldman commented as she sat to her husband's right. As for critiquing each other, Waldman said, they serve up something very different than the "praise sandwich" they give outsiders--criticism served between the bread of praise. If there's a deadline at stake, said Chabon, they forgo the fight they might otherwise have had before realizing that the other person was right and get back to work. Asked for life advice, the couple offered it in four words. Chabon said he learned the advice he was offering just this past year, when he turned 52, and said it applied to most people and instances: "Don't take the bait." Waldman's words were directed at one of their four children: "No more tattoos, please."
Book Passage co-owner Bill Petrocelli got to wear his writer's hat when he moderated a panel on debut authors. "When you write fiction," said the veteran bookseller and author of The Circle of Thirteen, who's working on his second novel, "you put it all out on the line."
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| Luisa Smith and Sam Barry working for Book Passage. | |
With just a few minor glitches, booksellers seemed very pleased with the first Bay Area Book Festival. "It's all good," said George Kiskaddon from Builder's Booksource in Berkeley.
"There was tremendous demand and interest," said Parsons, pointing out that even the 10 a.m. sessions were filled to capacity, as were just about every event at the festival. "We're definitely doing it again next year and we expect it will be the first weekend in June," she said. "The authors were really happy--and we had quite a few international authors--and we wanted to make sure they were treated well."
While selling books was a priority, the Bay Area Book Festival also collaborated with the East Bay Book Project, a grantee of Half Price Books, which provided a free book for every child at the event. And at the center of the festival was an interactive art installation, "Lacuna," constructed from 50,000 books donated by the Internet Archive; attendees could take the books from the installation for free. --Bridget Kinsella