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(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine) |
Amy Brill, 44, author, The Movement of Stars
What she’s reading: Iggy Peck, Architect and Rosie Revere, Engineer, by Andrea Beaty
�I have two young children, so I also read a lot of things that only have a sentence or two on each page, and some of them are absolutely perfect. Iggy Peck, Architect and Rosie Revere, Engineer, which are books about failure, which is a great lesson for young readers. And humans overall.�
Patrick Marshall, 30, filmmaker
What he’s reading: I Remember, by Georges Perec, and I Remember, by Joe Brainard
�This American guy named Joe Brainard wrote a book called I Remember, but Georges Perec never read it. Someone just told him, �It’s this book that’s like 500 things he remembers,’ and every sentence starts, �I remember�’ Perec just said,
�Oh, I’ll steal that.�
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(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine) |
Phong Bui, 50, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Brooklyn Rail
�I don’t bring any books. You get 20 to 30 books in a visit. You have to carry them very slowly to your car. I come back for round two sometimes. Normally I buy between 30 and 40 books.�
Rahawa Haile, 29, writer
What she’s reading: By Light We Knew Our Names, by Anne Valente
�I saw Naomi Klein this morning. Then everyone ran off to the climate march. I feel kind of bad for the publishers who are here, just because it’s so much thinner this year with people at the march.�
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(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine) |
Stu Watson, 33, founding editor of just-launched lit mag Prelude
What he’s reading: Five Women, by Robert Musil
�So much ink has been spilled about the decline of print media, but there really are a number of remarkable literary journals publishing right now�BOMB, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and Granta (and, of course, n+1).�
Kate Pawelczyk, 28, communications officer for UNICEF
What’ she’s reading: The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces, by Benjamin Shepard and Gregory Smithsimon
�I’m South African. I went to my first Brooklyn Book Festival to hear Paul Auster do a reading. I had been obsessed with his books ever since I read City of Glass in university back in South Africa.�
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(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine) |
Alyza Liu, 19, student
What she’s reading: Of Metal and Wishes, by Sarah Fine
�It’s essentially a retelling of The Phantom of the Opera set in a steampunk Asian world. It’s about a daughter who works with her father, who is a doctor, taking care of injured workers at a factory that provides cheap labor. It goes a little further than Phantom in that it investigates oppression a lot more.�
Rich Wisneski, 32, actor*
* Declined to be interviewed, citing mime protocol (and the terms of his appearance). He was one of six representing the Where’s Waldo? series at the festival�the other five being paper cutouts tucked around Columbus Park.