TLR’S Intern Soliders
Out To The Brooklyn Book
Festival
By Josh Fosbenner
SEPTEMBER 18th was a bright Sunday morning, blue-skied and breezy. Autumn’s chilly breath greeted me as I left Fairleigh Dickinson (the university homebase of TLR) and headed to the train station. My destination was the annual Brooklyn Book Festival, the “largest free literary event in New York City.”
After spending a good deal of time underground on the subway, I finally emerged topside in Brooklyn, and immediately found myself in a different world. Amidst the gardens and fountains outside the Brooklyn Borough Hall, over 260 different writers, publishers, literary magazines, and other print media organizations had tables set up.
The Center of the Festival (photo by Lauren Guastella)
The bibliophiles of Brooklyn had found heaven, if only for a day. Thousands of festival goers, both literary aficionados and passers-by alike, perused the different areas, which covered every possible area of interest; fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and every niche imaginable in between.
Along with the booths, there were also several different stages set up, where panels of writers as diverse as Jhumpa Lahiri, Joyce Carol Oates, Pete Hamill, Craig Thompson, Chuck Klosterman, Eoin Colfer, and Terry McMillian read their work, answered questions, and generally connected with the huge and diverse audience of the festival. Although the festival’s roots were in representing mostly Brooklyn-related writers and publishers, it has since grown to showcase an international host of talent, with more additions every year.
MY FIRST ORDER of business was to head to my table: The Literary Review.
Editorial Readers, Timmy Waldron and Carlos Rivera man TLR's table
We had a busy and nicely trafficked day at the TLR booth. We had copies of several of our most recent issues for sale, including the newest, “The Rat’s Nest“.
Aside from selling our unique collections of poetry, prose, essays and excerpts, we also gained over 100 new subscribers to our Read More mailing list, and met many lovely people (including some of the writers whose work we’ve published . . . like Chris Tarry, whose “Love Story” is featured in the new issue).
This was our second year at the festival, and we felt quite at home (our staff is a mishmash of Brooklynites and New Jersey-ers)
….for the most part. A few less-than-polite folks stopped by our table, if only to criticize our magazine and comment on what they saw as the futility of independent publishing. (“Who’s going to read this stuff any way?”)
Editor Minna Proctor chats with a TLR readers (photo by Lauren Guastella)
Perhaps the most unexpected visitor to our table was poet laureate Philip Levine, whose cryptic comments (“This magazine used to be ugly!” . . . “I have a bad relationship with this magazine” . . . “I wrote the editor” . . . “I had a friend who died who published poems in this magazine”) left us unsure as to whether he actually liked us or not.
Though it was a somewhat chilly day, the few chilly comments we received did not hinder our enjoyment of, and enthusiasm for, the day’s events. We offer our thanks to everyone who stopped by our table and gave their support!