Brooklyn Soon Will Fete Its Literary Stars

The president of Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz, is throwing a party at Borough Hall on September 16. Guests will include Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife, Nicole Krauss, who moved to Park Slope last summer; Jonathan Lethem, who was born many years ago in Boerum Hill, and Jhumpa Lahiri, Rick Moody, and Colson Whitehead, who all live in Brooklyn. The list goes on and the shelves fill up. A lot of them have written articles for the New Yorker, and visitors to the Tea Lounge have probably witnessed them in the act without even knowing it.

The party — quaintly dubbed the Brooklyn Book Fest by Mr. Markowitz and his fellow organizers — will be a day-long celebration of their craft. For all the huffing and puffing the Jonathans have been doing against development in the Atlantic Yards, the borough is proud to host their creativity.

"There's no question that over the last five years Brooklyn has become the mecca for aspiring authors as well as accomplished authors," Mr. Markowitz, who is expecting between 5,000 and 15,000 people to attend the free event, said. "I think there's something about the creative juices flowing in Brooklyn. It's a mix of ethnicities, religions, incomes, and lifestyles that really bring out the creative juices and give people the gift to really have the ability to write. And it is a gift, let's face it, to be able to write."

Let's face it, too, the same juices are not flowing through all of the Brooklyn literati.

Mr. Foer's fiction is nothing like Mr. Moody's; the essays of former congressional candidate Kevin Powell are nothing like the books of the Russian-born Gary Shteyngart. They are not really friends, and they will not be leaving the Book Fest in one bus.

But the Book Fest will bring them all together whether they like it or not. The Beats had the Village; McSweeney's has San Francisco. The Brooklynites will have the Book Fest. For at least one day, they will be a literary scene, even though local magazines can't even sell enough ads because the readers are too provincial. Standing beneath the same banner, the Brooklyn writers will show some geographic solidarity even if they have little else in common.

"We're trying to focus on how diverse Brooklyn authors are," the head organizer, an independent publisher who chairs the Brooklyn Literacy Council, Johnny Temple, says.

According to a preliminary schedule, some of the "top authors" will chair a panel during which they will read 10-minute passages written by literary figures who inspired their writing. Elsewhere, some writers will discuss Brooklyn hip-hop as a literary influence. Fans of the culinary arts, meanwhile, will get a chance to hear Brooklyn chefs and food writers discuss the borough's tradition of eating.

During "The Streets Are Talking," authors will discuss how their writing relates to Brooklyn and read excerpts from their Brooklyn-based work.

According to a noted Brooklyn writer who currently serves as the editor of the Brooklyn Papers, Gersh Kuntzman, some of the authors might even make friends.

"What brings them together, I think, is a commitment to the neighborhood that they live in. I don't mean politically or socially, but these people, if you ask them where they live, they're not going to say New York City, they're going to say Brooklyn."