We’re looking forward to the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend, not least because of the many WWB contributors it will bring to the stage! The main festival is on Sunday, but we’ll be kicking it off on Friday at 6:30 p.m. with “Expressive Expedients,” a Bookend Event presented by the PEN Translation Committee and moderated by Alta L. Price.
On Sunday at 12:00 p.m., WWB contributing editor Anderson Tepper will moderate “That Global 70s Show,” a conversation about that pivotal decade with Guadalupe Nettel, Alejandro Zambra, and Georgi Gospodinov (who will also appear next Wednesday at the Bulgarian Consulate General with Milena Deleva and our very own Eric M. B. Becker). At 1:00 p.m., 2015 Man Booker International Prize-winner László Krasznahorkai and Naja Marie Aidt will explore “Darkness and Light” in a conversation moderated by Gabriel Sanders.
Then, good luck picking from the incredible lineup of events at 2:00 p.m., when PEN American Center presents translator Mara Faye Lethem with Claudia Zoe Bedrick, Julia Heim, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, and Alex Zucker in a discussion about “Translating Books for Youth.” Naja Marie Aidt is also back at 2:00 p.m., this time with André Alexis, Christian Kracht, and moderator Rivka Galchen, for “Subverting Tropes: Household Appliances, Talking Dogs, and Robinson Crusoe.” At the same time, “War Stories” will bring together WWB Board Member Maaza Mengiste, Christopher Robinson, Mark Doten, and Sara Nović to discuss depicting war through fiction; and Eduardo Halfon, Geoff Dyer, and Francine Prose will talk about “Redrawing Boundaries” in their writing.
At 4:00 p.m., it’s a five-star panel on “The New Latin American Literature” with Valeria Luiselli, Yuri Herrera, Andrés Neuman, Guadalupe Nettel, and Alejandro Zambra, moderated by Daniel Alarcón. Also make a point to stop by the Literary Marketplace, where Akashic Books, Other Press, Restless Books, Deep Vellum, Archipelago, and many other awesome publishers will be selling their books.
To cap off the Festival, there will be another great Bookend Event at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, September 21, featuring Eric M. B. Becker in conversation with Katy Derbyshire and Geoff Mak. Join them at the Goethe Institut for “Net Lit Unlimited,” a discussion of the limits and un-limits of sharing literature on the internet.
We hope our readers will be able to make it to many of this weekend’s events. For those who can’t, rest assured that there’s a wealth of work from these contributors available on our site 360 days a year.