Culture
The Borough Reads Late at the Brooklyn Book Festival
The Brooklyn Book Festival spends its week in bars and bookshops before Sunday's free main event
At a quarter to eight this morning, a flotilla of canoes was due on the Gowanus Canal, its readers reciting Edgar Allan Poe up to an audience on the Carroll Street Bridge. The Gowanus Dawn Reading is in its tenth year. It is also one of the few moments this week when the Brooklyn Book Festival is awake before noon.
The festival is known for its Sunday. This year it is the 21st edition, and it bills itself as the largest free literary festival in New York City. Over nine days it lists more than 160 events and nearly 500 authors, according to its published 2026 schedule. But most of the week happens after work, in rooms with a bar along one wall.
The Bookend Nights
The festival calls them Bookend events. They started on September 20 and run through September 28, in all five boroughs, and most of them are free. Read the listings and a map of the city's literary nightlife comes into focus.
Wednesday's listings put Crown Heights Lit Night at The Crown Inn on Franklin Avenue, with drink specials and a book raffle. On Fulton Street, the Patchwork Literary Salon was booked into Sisters for an evening of LGBTQ debut fiction, with festival themed cocktails and mocktails. At Mama Tried on Third Avenue in Brooklyn, the small press Under the BQE marked the equinox with live jazz and flash readings capped at five minutes each.
Thursday's calendar sent the Tipsy Bee to Someday Bar on Atlantic Avenue. The premise is simple and a little cruel. Authors try to spell words pulled from their own books and from reviews of them, and the bee continues until one writer is left standing. Out in Bushwick, Orion Bar was set for a celebration of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, with readings and traditional drumming by KQT Pungmul.
Most of the week happens after work, in rooms with a bar along one wall.
Tonight is busy. The translation press World Editions launches a series called Read the World A to Z at The Rabbit Books and Bar on Avenue A, with 26 translated novels planned, one country for each letter of the alphabet. The National Book Critics Circle convenes critics from The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and n+1 at Community Bookstore in Park Slope to talk about the craft of criticism and where book critics can still find room to work. And Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene throws the 16th annual Brooklyn Indie Party with the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, an evening of small presses, drinks and mingling.
Sunday in Downtown Brooklyn
Then comes the day the festival is named for. Festival Day and the Literary Marketplace run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday, September 27, around Brooklyn Borough Hall. The festival's own site lists eight indoor and outdoor stages spread across Borough Hall, Brooklyn Law School, the Center for Brooklyn History, St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church, Columbus Park and Korean War Veterans Park.
The marketplace is the part that fills the streets. Organizers call it the largest book market on the East Coast. The Village Voice counts more than 250 publishers in it. Everything on the stages is free.
The names are big. Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Joyce Carol Oates, Douglas Stuart and Namwali Serpell are all on the bill. This year's BoBi honoree, Amitav Ghosh, appears in conversation with the novelist Nathaniel Rich. The Borough Hall courtroom opens the day with a panel on horror comics, then moves to a discussion of whether writers owe the public their politics, with Serpell, Francine Prose and Merve Emre.
There is a way to arrive in character. MTA Arts and Design runs a Poetry in Motion ride to the festival on Sunday morning, meeting at the Brooklyn Bridge City Hall station, and riders get a free Poetry in Motion anthology or bookmark set. The program has been putting poems on trains for more than 30 years with the Poetry Society of America.
The festival was founded in 2006 by then Borough President Marty Markowitz along with Liz Koch and Carolyn Greer, as the Voice recounts. Its founders wanted to showcase a Brooklyn voice in literature. Two decades on, that voice reaches all five boroughs.
The Week Has a Last Word
The festival does not end when the marketplace packs up. Monday, September 28, carries one more round of evenings, and some of the strongest of the week.
At the Brooklyn Public Library's central branch on Grand Army Plaza, a forum on the late critic Greg Tate brings together Arthur Jafa, Questlove, dream hampton and Jelani Cobb, with Daphne A. Brooks moderating. Tate, a critic and journalist, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize after his death, in 2024. The lineup alone shows how wide his circle ran.
Back at Someday Bar the same night, the #YeahYouWrite series throws a night of fiction readings, literary cocktails and an open mic. In Jackson Heights, The World's Borough Bookshop hosts the launch of EGOBIBL, a new literary journal from students at The Q Studio Lab in Queens. In Manhattan, Verso Books hosts publishers from Haymarket, Street Noise Books and Verso to talk about making political books.
Johnny Temple, co-chair of the festival's Literary Council, tied the week to the city's recent run of good fortune in remarks quoted by the Village Voice. He noted that after the Knicks' championship, the city is on a roll, and that the festival intends to keep it rolling. It is a sports metaphor for a very indoor sport. Still, anyone who has watched a crowded bookshop go quiet for a reader knows the feeling he means.
For readers who like their books after dark, this is the week to be out. The city has an all night bookstore in its mythology and a free festival in its calendar. For nine days they overlap, and most of the action starts around seven.