Brooklyn Book Festival: Way Cool, and Way Too Much to Take In

Reportedly, next year's Brooklyn Book Festival will span two days. That would be a good thing (and we say this in a very nice way). We stopped in to the Book Fest at Brooklyn Borough Hall yesterday afternoon and found it to be a wonderfully cool event, but also quickly concluded that there was way too much going on at any given time to take in. We have a hard time deciding what to have for dinner, so in this case, the result was near decisionmaking paralysis. Do we check out the New World Noir presentation on the main stage with Lawrence Block? See the City on the Edge readings with Jonathan Ames? What about the Notes from the Underground discussion with Johnny Temple of Akashic Books, Ted Hamm of the Brooklyn Rail and others? And that was the dilemma only from 2:00-3:00.

The Fest looked like it was a big success, and it was awesome to see so many people from the sprawling Brooklyn literary universe gathered in one place. The Book Festival drew a sizeable crowd, and the set up at Borough Hall was comfortable and fun. (Plus, the weekly Farmer's Market was set up in the middle, so you could score some killer heirloom tomatoes We especially dug way the steps of Borough Hall were used as ampitheater seating for the main stage. The non-fiction stage, where we caught brewmaster Gerrett Oliver and rat expert Robert Sullivan was also fun.

The blog sarahana has some excellent early photos of the event, though we are certain many, many more are to come today and tomorrow, and we'll round them up when they do. Meantime, here are a few shots we took, though we were mostly trying to concentrate on listening for a change.


Lawrence Block at the microphone.


Robert Sullivan, author of Dirty Secrets: A Literary Investigation of Rats & Garbage


The crowd on the steps of Borough Hall, watching the main stage.