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.
Last year, the City Council voted 46-4 to approve the School Construction Authority’s plans for a new school building on the lot of P.S. 133, or the William A. Butler School, on Baltic Street and 4th Avenue in Park Slope. The 109 year old school is currently under asbestos remediation, shrouded and hidden from site.
My novel, A Thread of Sky, is the story of a family of six strong-willed, Chinese-American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home, a story inspired by a tour of China that I undertook ten years ago with the women in my own family. I should mention that it was a package tour; that it was my mother’s idea; and that calling the women in my family “strong-willed” is a bit of an understatement. Here is an excerpt.
Of all the Brooklyn books I like, my favorite is one that does not exist on its own: it’s buried in a much larger novel about World War II and the death camps.
On the afternoon of Friday, July 14th, 1939, Pete Panto left the Moore-Mack pier where he served as hiring foreman at five o’clock and headed home to his rooming house near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In his room on North Eliott Place he was shaving for a date later that evening with his fiancée, Alice Maffia, when her younger brother Michael came to the room with word that Panto had a telephone call at the corner cigar store. Panto wiped his face and made his way downstairs, but when he returned from his conversation his mood had darkened. He seemed uncharacteristically spooked as he told Michael he would be meeting “two tough mugs” or “men I don’t like” for an hour or so that night, warning “If I don’t get back by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, tell the police.”
Last night Amy Sohn crossed Brooklyn’s psychic divider – Flatbush Avenue – into Crown Heights. At Franklin Park’s Reading Series, the Park Slope maven read from her book Prospect Park West, which has caused a stir among the swanky slope set.
After reading a passage from her novel that takes place at Southpaw – whose investors also own Franklin Park – she read a passage that references a character’s fixation on Roman Polanski, which was written and released before the 76 year-old director was jailed recently on a 30 year old charge of statutory rape. Sohn made sure the crowd knew she doesn’t share that fixation with her character. Watch the video after the jump.
The unofficial present-day Bard of Brooklyn stopped by Greenlight Bookstore last night to christen the borough’s newest independent bookshop. Jonathan Lethem, author of such notable Brooklyn titles as Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, read a portion of his new Manhattan-based novel, Chronic City, to a packed house as latecomers squeezed through the door like rush-hour riders on the 4 train. Watch our exclusive video from the event after the jump.
