I spent a fun half-hour browsing tables at yesterday’s Brooklyn Book Festival. I also caught the tail end of a very interesting reading and discussion on the stage across from Borough Hall called Rhythm Maps, featuring Staceyann Chin, Steve Dalachinsky, Gregory Pardlo, and Danny Simmons.

Apparently 10,000 people enjoyed this day of books. The weather was perfect for browsing, listening to writers reading, and chit chatting with vendors, writers and friends.

The selection of publishing vendors was geographically diverse but it included plenty of Brooklyn-based groups including, the NY Writers Coalition Inc., One Story, Outside the Box Publishing, Pathfinder Books, PEN American Center, Poets & Writers, Polytechnic University, Power House Books/ Power House Arenas, Red Pill Press, Seven Stories Press, Sleepingfish, Small Beer Press, Soft Skull/Counterpoint, Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers, The Green-Wood Historic Fund, The Saint Ann’s Review, Tin House and many more.

I bought three beautifully designed editions of novellas from a series by Melville House Publishing called "The Art of the Novella."  I got The Dead by James Joyce, Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, and First Love by Ivan Turgenev.

Good subway reading, I got these three of my favorite pieces of literature for Teen Spirit.

The Melville House series celebrates the novella, a form that is too short to be a novel and too long to be a short story and is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers.

I didn’t make it to any of the other readings. Did you? Do tell.