BrooklynTheBorough.com is excited to feature the work of graphic novelist and native Brooklynite Martin Lemelman. Extended through November, he will bring us the final two chapters from his return to Brooklyn series, original work based on his latest novel Two Cents Plain, released in August on Bloomsbury.
November 3, 2010 Classic, Multi/Media, Photo, Read Features
This year’s 5th annual Book Festival at Borough Hall was a hit once again, despite the rainy weather, and we were fortunate enough to catch a lot of great authors. Watch our video for a taste of the fest.
September 13, 2010 Authors Speak, Digital/Read, Local/Readings, Multi/Media, Read Features, The Locals, The Read, Video
Elizabeth Streb is a special force. She has jumped through glass, set herself on fire and has undertaken the equally dangerous feat of writing a book, Streb: How to Become an Extreme Action Hero, published by the Feminist Press in 2010. Owner of the performance company Streb and the S.L.A.M (Streb Lab for Action Mechanics) studio in Williamsburg, Streb will appear at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival.
September 10, 2010 Classic, Read Features
On the eve of Greenlight Bookstore’s one year anniversary – actually next month – Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting, the Fort Greene duo who founded the shop, are also set to ring in their first year at the Brooklyn Book Festival. On Friday from 7:30-9PM they’ll host one of the festival’s bookend events, The Brooklyn Indie Party, featuring locals like Melville House and Akashic’s own Johnny Temple, the night’s resident DJ along with music writer Dave Tompkins. We caught up with Jessica to talk birthdays and books.
September 10, 2010 Read Features
Intelligent, wry and hilarious writing make Kate Christensen a serious wordsmith and a PEN/Faulkner fiction award winner. Her titles include Trouble (Doubleday, 2009), The Great Man (Doubleday 2007), and The Epicure’s Lament (Anchor, 2005). Her characters, often set in Brooklyn, are fun to read and incredibly believable; her human portrayals of gay and lesbian characters is also a plus. She will appear at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival on the Me…In The World panel.
September 9, 2010 Classic, Read Features
T Cooper’s The Beaufort Diaries, released by Melville House in July, reads more like a grown-up picture book than a graphic novel. Cooper will appear at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, on a panel titled How Things Shake Out.
September 9, 2010 Read Features
This year’s Brooklyn Book Festival on September 12 is bigger than ever with two days of “Bookend” events and all-star authors like Salman Rushdie, Naomi Klein, and Gary Shteyngart. We caught up with Johnny Temple, president of the Brooklyn Literary Council, to talk about Akashic Books, how music and literature connect, and who he’s most excited to see at the festival.
September 8, 2010 Classic, Read Features
That New Year’s Day of the Brooklyn literary scene, the Brooklyn Book Festival, is fast approaching. On September 12, myriad writers, readers, and other assorted bookfolk will descend once again on Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. In anticipation, we visited with author (most recently of Reset) and “Studio 360” host, Kurt Andersen.
September 7, 2010 Classic, Read Features, Video
Greenlight Books and Feminist Press staffer Natalie Peart recommends her favorite queer literature for summertime reading.
August 3, 2010 Classic, Queer Life, Read Features
Rakesh Satyal, friend of BrooklynTheBorough.com and author of the novel Blue Boy (Kensington, 2009), recently won the Gay Debut Fiction Award at the 22nd Annual Lambda Literary Awards. Upon being presented with the award, he broken into song – something that he’s well known for doing – and this time he caught the attention of the New Yorker. We caught up with the Fort Greene-based author about the award, his speech and what’s in store for a potential second, musical career path.
June 24, 2010 Authors Speak, Classic, Local/Readings, Queer News, Read Features, Video
I met and fell in love with the man of my dreams on my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later on, when I’d tell friends, they’d act incredulous. “That only happens in the movies,” they’d said, and I’d say it, too, clinging to that perfect beginning, holding it up as evidence long after everything else told me to let go.
June 4, 2010 Read Features
The 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival will take place on Sunday, September 12. Big-name authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Harding, Dennis Lehane and Jonathan Lethem will read and take part in panel discussions. This year, the festival has expanded and will include new, special events. Click through for details.
June 3, 2010 Read Features
The ribbon cutting for Pier 1, the first section of Brooklyn Bridge Park to open, took place in the rain on Monday, March 22.
April 1, 2010 Multi/Media, Read Features, Video
The first time I saw Reddog—a lean, Pit Bull mix—I peered through the haze of anxiety and heroin hangover that I then lived in, and thought: now that is a sexy dog. Beauty like his, the kind we call sexy, it pleases some aesthetic instinct, softens something in us, makes us want to look longer, to memorize its implicit promise that there is ease in the world, that some things accord.
February 24, 2010 Boroughing, Guest Authors, Read Features
Holden’s hunter’s cap haunts me as a lasting symbol of American literature as few others do. At once evocative of the hunt—of searching—and an insulation against the world, Holden’s defining sartorial article works nicely as a metaphor to be mined by high school English students in sophomore term papers year after year. But as nexus between the “very corny” trappings of life and the way we occasionally can’t help but fall for them ourselves, it also serves as a perfect reflection of the place Catcher in the Rye has staked out in the canon.
February 2, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Read Features
Good news for all those who love things tartan, or things poetic, or things containing sheep’s heart, liver and lungs minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and simmered in the animal’s stomach several hours: it’s Burns’ Day!
January 25, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Multi/Media, Read Features, Video
The Best Book (McSweeney’s, $24.95) takes everything you want from a book and combines it with everything everyone else wants, producing quite simply the single best book of all time.
December 29, 2009 Boroughing, Classic, Read Features
It was announced this week that the biweekly magazine Kirkus Reviews is closing its doors at the end of the year. I’m not saying that Kirkus didn’t have its place: indeed, I generally valued the thoughtful nature of not only Kirkus’s reviews, but their openness to paying attention to books that other prepubs often ignored out of hand. And if nothing else, the more reviews anything receives, the higher the odds that its qualities will be appreciated.
December 11, 2009 Classic, Read Features
Well can you believe it, folks, it’s December already. And with Black Friday and Cyber Monday and One Last Chance at Free Shipping Tuesday, it’s already Why Haven’t You Done All Your Shopping By Now Wednesday. So before it’s too late (I’m Already Sick of Hearing About Gifts and It’s Only Thursday), let’s go shopping! (Yay!) For books! (Grumble, grumble…)
December 2, 2009 Boroughing, Classic, Read Features
Welcome to the first installment of Undusted, a series that will feature interesting but long-neglected or even forgotten pieces of writing that deserve another look. It’s writing that has aged well, even if no one has perused the curves of its S’s in a while. Like the rest of the BtheB literary posts that will constitute the section known as The Read, Undusted items may or may not have anything to do with Brooklyn.*
At any rate, the following interview with Mark Twain appeared in the New York World Sunday Magazine on November 26, 1905, and describes what Mr. Twain, aka Mr. Clemens, was thankful for on this American holiday. Click through to read it in its entirety.
November 26, 2009 Boroughing, Classic, Read Features
The description for the Independent Media Voices panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival was slightly more in depth than the subsequent discussion between Amy Goodman (host, Democracy Now!), Pamela Newkirk (author of Letters From Black America), and Richard Nash (publisher, Soft Skull Press), moderated by Dennis Loy Johnson (publisher, Melville House Press). Though the speakers were a little bit disjointed after a last minute change that replaced zine guru Jessica Hopper with Mr. Nash, Ms. Goodman stayed on her point that the corporate media is in bed with war profiteers. Video after the jump.
September 14, 2009 Boroughing, Classic, Local/Readings, Multi/Media, Read Features, The Read, Video
The Brooklyn Book Festival set up shop in our literary left bank utopia on Sunday, and it was a typical day in Brooklyn: David Cross yelled about Jews, Amy Goodman yelled about war profiteers and then things got a little gay. Video after the jump.
September 13, 2009 Boroughing, Classic, Multi/Media, Read Features, Video
Cinema loves Brooklyn. In classic films like Dog Day Afternoon, Do the Right Thing, and Saturday Night Fever, Hollywood takes us to the bumper cars at Coney Island, through the Bed-Stuy of the 1980s, and across the Brooklyn Bridge. But in Brooklynite Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, our borough is present only through its absence—as the beloved home that one of our protagonists wishes she weren’t leaving. Here, Brooklyn represents comfort and familiarity, rather than the brand new adventure that it does for so many of the young people who are now settling into it.
August 20, 2009 Film, Read FeaturesBrooklyn-born Frank McCourt, pulitzer prize winning school teacher and the best-selling author of Angela’s Ashes, died Sunday of cancer at age 78.
July 20, 2009 Read FeaturesTom Folsom’s new book The Mad Ones keeps the author on the safe side of history. You won’t believe the tales he has to tell about Crazy Joe Gallo, a gangster from Red Hook who took on the establishment – the Costa Nostra – in the 1960s.
June 23, 2009 Classic, Read FeaturesUnnameable Books hasn’t even opened the doors to their new location on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights yet, but the shop has already been scheduled to host poets and musicians for a festival in September.
June 11, 2009 Read Features
Nancy Balbirer was wearing flip-flops when she walked by Bergdorf Goodman on a hot summer day in 2003 and happened upon a serene Yoko Ono.
“I never would have imagined my reaction to meeting Yoko Ono would be thus: ‘OH MY GOD YOKO ONO! I LOVE YOU!” the author recounted recently. “And I threw my arms around her.”
Ms. Balbirer, 43, was sitting at a table in the Chelsea Market, discussing her new book, Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences, published recently by Bloomsbury. The title refers to how David Mamet – once the author’s acting teacher at NYU – categorized the roles in which women are cast in Hollywood.
June 8, 2009 Classic, Read Features
On Friday night, as the Book Expo kicked off at the Javits Center, the crowd at PowerHouse Arena in Dumbo was kickin’ it with KRS-ONE, the zen master of their new imprint I Am Hip Hop. The first book to drop? The Gospel of Hip Hop.
May 30, 2009 Brooklyn Beats, Classic, Music Profiles, Read FeaturesMarty Markowitz finally divulged this year’s list of participants in the 4th Annual Brooklyn Book Festival at Thursday night’s Literary Mingle at Borough Hall. The festival, scheduled for September 13, boasts a list of notable authors and participants that reflects the borough’s talented literary population. Brooklyn The Borough is excited to cover another gathering of Brooklyn’s bookish stars. The full list after the jump.
May 30, 2009 Read FeaturesLast Saturday afternoon, many Brooklynites happened upon Habana Outpost on Fulton Street in Fort Greene to find philosopher/rapper KRS-ONE preaching to his disciples.
May 14, 2009 Brooklyn Beats, Music Profiles, Read Features
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