The Picador Book Room

Literary types from all over will flock to Brooklyn this weekend for the Brooklyn Book Festival, where more than 280 authors will put on more than 104 events over the course of the weekend.

Picador is lucky to have several authors (Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Thomas Frank, Sheila Heti, and more) participating. Click through to see what events we’ll be attending this weekend. See you there, fellow book nerds!

Friday, September 21st 7:00 PM
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event

Powerhouse Arena
37 Main Street, Dumbo
Brooklyn, NY 11201
*Tickets $5

Saturday, September 22^nd 8:00PM
Denis Johnson (Train Dreams)
Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event
Reading of Johnson’s new play followed by Q&A with author and cast.

St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church
157 Montague Street (corner of Clinton Street)
Tickets: $10

Sunday, September 23^rd 10:00AM
Election 2012.The presidential election comes at a critical moment for the United States. Demands for US engagement abroad are substantial—particularly in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. At home, shortages of jobs and housing are creating domestic crises unseen in generations. What are the stakes in Election 2012? What would change with a Romney victory and what would stay the same?  A conversation featuring Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Change I Believe In), Tom Frank (Pity the Billionaire) and Eric Alterman (The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama). Moderated by Touré.

Brooklyn Historical Society Library
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, NY

Sunday, September 23rd at 10:00 AM
The London Review of Books presents The Novel and the City.
A conversation about literature and the urban imagination with Mexican novelist Alvaro Enrigue, novelist Paul LaFarge and cultural writer Christine Smallwood. Moderated by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books.

Brooklyn Borough Hall Community Room
209 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn, NY

Sunday, September 23^rd 11:00AM
Ice or Salt:  The Personal in Fiction. W.B. Yeats wrote, “All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.” Authors Siri Hustvedt (Living, Thinking, Looking), Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård(My Struggle) and Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?) will consider how writing technique—“ice or salt”—transforms the personal into art that connects to a broad audience. Moderated by Phillip Lopate.

Brooklyn Borough Hall Courtroom
209 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn, NY

Sunday, September 23^rd 11:00AM
A Conversation about Conscience. Why do some people make painful and challenging decisions of conscience—and why do so many others often choose not to? Fifty years after Hannah Arendt examined the dynamics of conformity in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, this panel will explore the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention. Featuring E.O. Wilson(The Social Conquest of Earth), Eyal Press (Beautiful Souls) and Louisa Thomas(Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family: A Test of Will and Faith in World War I).  Moderated byTed Hamm.

Brooklyn Historical Society Library
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, NY

Sunday, September 23^rd 12:00PM
Through the Eyes of a Child: Join Somali-English author Nadifa Mohamed (Black Mamba Boy), Maaza Mengiste (Beneath the Lion’s Gaze) and Congo’s Emmanuel Dongala (Johnny Mad Dogand Little Boys Come from the Stars) for a conversation on contemporary African novels which explore themes of identity, memory and violence through child narrators. Moderated by Bhakti Shringarpure, Warscapes.

Brooklyn Borough Hall Community Room
209 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn, NY

Sunday, September 23^rd 1:00PM
Humanity in the Age of the Cyborg and Higgs Boson. The ancient question “What is the Self?” gets a new twist with the rise of nanotechnology, biotechnology and “smart” robots that increasingly assume functions previously handled by human muscle and mind. How do we define consciousness and existence in the age of cyborg bodies and artificial intelligence? Siri Hustvedt (Living, Thinking, Looking), Jim Holt(Why Does the World Exist) and Andrew Blum(Tubes) discuss mutating selfhood and what still makes us human. Moderated by Katherine Bouton.

Brooklyn Law School Moot Courtroom
250 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn, NY

Sunday, September 23^rd 2:00PM
Literary Lions. Readings by award winning authors Pete Hamill(Tabloid City), Edwidge Danticat (Create Dangerously) and Paul Auster (Winter Journal). Whether their point of view is a palimpsest of Brooklyn fiction or set in other places, they have each lived in Brooklyn and been influenced by it. Followed by Q & A. Introduced by Johnny Temple, Publisher, Akashic Books and Chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council.

Saint Ann and the Holy Trinity Church
157 Montague Street
Brooklyn, NY