Hooves on the Turf

Brooklyn Book Festival returns this Sunday

The annual Brooklyn Book Festival returns to Borough Hall this Sunday (forecast is sunny), featuring a multitude of vendors, panels and workshops, and covering a wide range of interests: fiction, poetry, biography, comics, politics. Admission is free, but a ticket must be picked up for select events, such as the Poetry, Pop, and Hip-Hop panel, where Thurston Moore and Lupe Fiasco, amongst others, discuss “how poets, songwriters and rappers push language in new and essential ways”. See full schedule

Since you can pick up a ticket only an hour prior to each event, and the turnout was great last year, making it into ticketed panels one after the next will probably be impossible. Here are the ones I’ll be trying to get into.

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Oliver Sacks, Zadie Smith, Fiona Apple, others at New Yorker Festival

And tickets go on sale tomorrow at noon!

I’m psyched about Oliver Sacks, author of several of my favorite books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf. He will talk from his newest, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain at this year’s New Yorker Festival, which is promising mind-rejuvenating panels in abundance throughout the weekend of October 5 (full schedule). Then there’s Zadie Smith, whose last event in New York, an evening at BAM, sold out way in advance; who spoke with such fury and conviction at last year’s festival, and whose White Teeth remains one of the most refreshing books I’ve ever read. Also participating are Fiona Apple, Sigur Ros, Yo La Tengo, actor Bill Nighy, authors Salman Rushdie, Miranda July, Ian McEwan, Steve Martin, amongst many others.