Brooklyn Book Festival 2011

Books I most want to read from having seen their authors live: Karen Russell, SWAMPLANDIA and Michael Dickman, FLIES. Russell read from a soon-to-be-published short story called "A Family Restaurant"; Dickman read some of his poems, and did you know, he has a twin brother who is also a poet?
Best reader of the festival (that I saw): Elissa Schappell. I feel as though it would be a slight to say that she was dramatic as she read from her collection BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS but will you accept that she had stage presence?
Best mustache of the festival (that I saw): Jim Shepard. Monumental.
Best news from the comics panel: Kate Beaton of Hark! a Vagrant fame (also: GREAT GATSBYS, Dude Watchin' With The Brontes) will be cohosting a monthly comedy show here.
How to run a good panel at 10AM: Talk about dudes in kilts! (That was Diana Gabaldon on the influence of "Doctor Who" on her work, which is to say, it hasn't much.)
How to run a not-so-good panel at 10AM: Skip any discussion in favor of readings that lilt on softly... oh, so softly...
New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller authors met: One, Tom Perrotta, who spoke softly and briefly about battling back his mother's voice in his head telling him he couldn't write things. He read a passage in his new book THE LEFTOVERS from the perspective of a teenage girl, and I appreciated all over again how nuanced and non-histrionic I found that character's writing. Even her friend, the described-by-Perrotta "sexy teenager," has layers. It's a terrific book.

Books I brought with me to the festival: Just one, Amitav Ghosh's RIVER OF SMOKE (it's really long).
Best non-programming addition to the BKBF: Food trucks. It's obvious, right?
Panels hit: 7
Bookend events attended: The aforementioned Community Bookstore 40th Anniversary celebration, where I saw Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss all read in an unexpectedly cavernous church on a cloudy afternoon. I don't know how they picked their readings, but in Krauss' case, it was suggested that she had bought the book at the store itself (she and JSF live nearby, and if you do enough digging you can figure out where). This bookstore is not the closest to me, but it is the best closest to me, whose feats include handselling a pre-publication copy of THE PALE KING to me over Twitter, which is just spectacular service. Happy birthday! And many more.
Major and minor regrets: The parties I missed on Thursday/Friday nights; that Fran Lebowitz/ Wallace Shawn panel everyone was raving about. Did anyone notice that there wasn't an n+1 presence at the fest as there has been in previous years?
Brooklyn Book Fests attended by me: 5 (here's last year's recap. Without really intending to, this shaped up to be something of an alternative year for me; I didn't hit any ticketed panels because I didn't feel like waiting in line, so, I didn't, and I made it to (as mentioned above) panels featuring poetry, comics/graphic novelists and sci-fi/fantasy novelists, which is a broader scope than I usually take. It was quite pleasant!

Literary things I did while writing this post: Thought about buying a Joan Didion/ Sloane Crosley lecture ticket (is $25 too much?) (but I mean, DIDION); grew irritated at the New Yorker subscriber site for making me re-log in to that Dickman brothers article after nearly every page; wondered what I would ask Adam Rapp if I ever saw him again; realized I forgot to pick up my copy of THE DESCENDANTS at the library and now it's expired, shoot.
Literary thing I ate tonight: An "American Globs" ice cream cone at the new Big Gay Ice Cream store in the East Village named for, obviously, Neil Gaiman. It was good but I should have gone for one of the cones with dulce de leche.
Did I buy it on purpose? No; the girl at the counter recommended it because of the pretzels.
Had I left the store when I got the reference? Not yet!
Person to blame that this post is so late: Lance Armstrong.

National Book Award finalists announced

Stay tuned for the big upset.

Fiction: 
Peter Carey, PARROTT & OLIVIER IN AMERICA (read it, liked it!)
Nicole Krauss, GREAT HOUSE (hear good things)
Lionel Shriver, SO MUCH FOR THAT (hear good things, like the author)
Jaimy Gordon, LORD OF MISRULE (never heard of it
Karen Tei Yamashita, I HOTEL (never heard of it)

Nonfiction:
Barbara Demick, NOTHING TO ENVY: ORDINARY LIVES IN NORTH KOREA (never heard of it)
John W. Dower, CULTURES OF WAR: PEARL HARBOR, HIROSHIMA, 9-11, IRAQ (never heard of it)
Justin Spring, SECRET HISTORIAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SAMUEL STEWARD (never heard of it)
Megan K. Stack, EVERY MAN IN THIS VILLAGE IS A LIAR: AN EDUCATION IN WAR (never heard of it)
Patti Smith, JUST KIDS (what!!!!!)

The ceremony's November 17th and Tom Wolfe will be getting a special achievement award. Check out the website if you want to read up on the finalists and the poetry/YA categories.

The New Yorker's 20 Under 40

In classically bitchy fashion, the Times goes ahead and publishes the list before David Remnick's baby hits newsstands next Monday. The question isn't whether you have any opinions on it, but do you have enough? Herewith, the class of 2010:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chris Adrian
Daniel Alarcón
David Bezmozgis
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Joshua Ferris
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Rivka Galchen
Nicole Krauss
Yiyun Li
Dinaw Mengestu
Philipp Meyer
C. E. Morgan
Téa Obreht
Z Z Packer
Karen Russell
Salvatore Scibona
Gary Shteyngart
Wells Tower

I will quickly call out a few members:

The Prodigy: The youngest author on the list is 24-year-old Téa Obreht, a Cornell MFA grad from the former Yugoslavia whose first novel hasn't even come out yet. All eyes will be on that book (it's called THE TIGER'S DAUGHTER) but Roving Editor seems to have read it and apparently there is an actual tiger in it. Oh boy.
The Overachiever: Author Chris Adrian's other job is pediatric oncologist.
The Married Couple: Super day for the Safran Foer-Krauss hauss, or launch of a thousand after-dinner arguments? Just kidding, I'm sure they aren't that petty.
The First Mistake: Despite the Times calling out the "international" character of the list, at my extremely rough count, the list stands at 9 foreign-born, 11 American-born, which means your odds are still slightly better as an American. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
The Disappointed: Of all the authors who were too old to make the list, the Times singled out only Colson Whitehead and Dave Eggers as not making the cut. Strikes me as slightly unfair, since a lot of authors are also too old, although some are much too old and others are just slightly too old.
The Busy Summer: By my accounting I have a lot of reading to do, since I've only read books by five of them. Pathetic showing. Dare you do better?