IN 2006, when the Brooklyn Book Festival was in its first year, a panel discussion focused on how Brooklyn had shaped the writing of Jonathan Lethem, Paula Fox and Emily Barton. Pete Hamill and Jennifer Egan, both of Brooklyn, talked about their literary inspirations. Dramatic readings from the work of legendary Brooklyn writers were staged in a plaza outside Borough Hall. This year, the festival’s sixth, it remains centered in the same pocket of downtown Brooklyn. But its borders have spread far beyond.
“Even though the festival is set in Brooklyn and has a Brooklyn flavor, it’s an international festival,” said Johnny Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books and the chairman of the Brooklyn Literary Council, which leads the planning of the festival. “We bring in authors from all over the world. It is not a Brooklyn-focused or Brooklyn-oriented festival.”
Mr. Temple estimated that in 2006, perhaps half of the authors at the festival were based in Brooklyn. This year it is more like a fifth.
The lineup of events for the festival, which takes place on Sunday, includes appearances by more than 260 authors and other participants. Many of them are regulars, like Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize winner who will be honored with the “Best of Brooklyn” Award (or BoBi) for outstanding contributions to literature.
But the festival also features writers like Larry McMurtry, Joyce Carol Oates and Fran Lebowitz, who are strongly identified with places outside Brooklyn.
Mr. McMurtry, chronicler of the West, will talk Hollywood with his screenwriting partner, Diana Ossana. One panel is devoted to a conversation about fiction between Amitav Ghosh, the Indian-born novelist, and Nuruddin Farah, the Somalian writer.
Ms. Lebowitz, who lives in what she calls the East Village but what recent Manhattan arrivals might call NoHo, said she used to be a regular at New York Is Book Country, a festival in Manhattan that was large enough for Fifth Avenue to be shut down in its honor. (New York Is Book Country has been discontinued, so the Brooklyn Book Festival has no Manhattan competitor.)
“It’s hard to imagine that they would close a street in New York for books instead of lawn chairs,” Ms. Lebowitz said in a telephone interview last week, referring to the pedestrian plaza in Times Square.
This is the first year she will attend the Brooklyn Book Festival, to appear on a panel called “Defining the Moment, U.S.A. 2011: Where Are We?” with Deborah Eisenberg and Wallace Shawn, to discuss the country’s anxiety and why it is poorly understood.
Though she said she could become lost and confused outside the gridlike confines of Manhattan, Ms. Lebowitz has become a surprisingly frequent visitor to Brooklyn.
“My previous experience with Brooklyn, before it became present-day Brooklyn, was visiting my grandmother in Brighton Beach when I was a kid,” she said. “I come to Brooklyn more often now than I ever imagined I would.”
The festival has evolved from its early days, when it had a much more local feel and a Brooklyn focus, although Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, still helps plan and coordinate the event.
“It was definitely a much smaller scale,” said Christine Onorati of Word bookstore in Greenpoint. “You felt it was very centered on what was happening in Brooklyn. Now it’s like a celebration of books for everything, not just Brooklyn.”
Mr. Temple said he had ambitions to expand the festival into a multi-day literary event, like the renowned Miami Book Fair International and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. He is also considering holding “Bookend” events, which happen over several days as add-ons to the festival, throughout the entire city, not just Brooklyn. But many of the regulars, who have been attending the festival since 2006, said they appreciated that it has held onto much of its original feel. Independent publishers and small presses set up booths where they sell their books and promote their authors. Panel discussions are staged in the open air, with views of Manhattan in the background.
“So many conferences take place in giant hotels,” said Emma Straub, the author of the short-story collection “Other People We Married” and a bookseller at BookCourt, a popular Cobble Hill store. “Everybody gets to go home at night because it’s in Brooklyn.”
