Maryanne Wolf on the Death of (and Ways to Protect) Deep Reading

When journalist Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains appeared in 2010, I remember exchanging emails with Reggie H. and Lisa M. about it, reading numerous articles about it (including excerpts from the book) online, and eventually buying the book to dive fully into what he had to say. Overwhelmed at the time by my usual mountain of required reading it took me a while to get to it, but I did, and found his argument about the effects of the Internet on our brain and neural system quite persuasive. I even blogged a snippet from The Shallows at the end of that year. To quote Carr again:

The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

He was certainly on to something crucial about the various cognitive changed spurred by the US's increasing digital turn, and he wasn't alone in his assessment. Others like internet pioneer and guru Jaron Lanier took up related arguments about the effects not just of the net and our brains and nervous system, but the entire e-technological apparatus and its transformation of human sociality, economics, and our contemporary polity. Where Carr was alarmist--now proving to have been correct in his worries--Lanier was more measured, but in both cases, as with others who have written about the effects of the net, social media, etc., they were identifying the songs of more than one canary in the coal mine we're now deeply immersed in.

One very recent entry in this genre is Maryanne Wolf's Reader, Come Home (Harper Collins, 2018), which takes up some of the threads of her earlier books, Proust and the Squid (Harper Collins, 2011), and Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016), with a shift, as was the case with Carr, on online reading and its effects. Her earlier books explored the origins of human literacy and the challenges that our long human history of interacting with text faced as we moved into our current millennium, but now Wolf, Director of Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, where she is Associate Professor of Child Development, and thus someone steeped in the current state of research on reading, is concerned with reading itself. As Laura Miller describes in her recent Slate review of the book, Wolf began to notice something about her own experience as a reader that I'd noted anecdotally with some of my students, beginning perhaps roughly 10 years ago and increasing among them to the point that I had to rethink my syllabus and approach to teaching: a waning ability to concentrate, and engage in sustained, "deep reading."

And it was not just my students: even for me, I have begun at times to feel a creeping distraction and impatience at any online text that was too long or complex ("tl;dr"), with a resulting desultory engagement in response. When it comes to expansive online texts, the feeling waxes. Skim, leap, surf: shift from one open page to another, one link to another, expect that the headline and the first few paragraphs will supply you with all you need to know. Earlier this year, as I had witnessed among my undergraduates, I even found myself struggling to get into novels, growing impatient after only a few pages, something I had never experienced befored. Wolf felt something similar, bemoaning her own inability to stick with a long, complex text, which is to say, a work not unlike a great deal of literature in a variety of genres written for hundreds of years. This was one of the central points Carr had broached back in 2010--as had Wolf, in turns out, in her 2011 Guardian essay "Will the speed of online thought deplete our analytic thought?", citing none other than Marshall McLuhan, who'd suggested that the medium was the "massage" and the message, that the technology would not only serve as a vessel but shape what it brought to us, and would shape our understanding of it.

In her new book, Wolf specifically recounts the experience of testing her capacity to "deep read" by returning to a novel she'd loved when she was younger, the very dense, multilayered Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), German Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse's 1943 futuristic magnum opus about a group of monk-like intellectuals who retire to a fictional European country known as Castalia, sequestered from most technology and economics, where they run a school for boys and engage in a complex, profoundly subtle form of play, the eponymous Glass Bead Game, that requires a lifetime of study and reflection to perfect. As she recounts, she tried repeatedly to begin it, but could not, yet it was not as if she could not read anything; online texts she sailed, or rather skimmed through. Hesse's novel, however, proved to be a tremendous struggle, and she temporarily set it aside. As an experiment, she set aside a period each day in which she would try again to read it, and, lo and behold, she began to find that after an extended period of struggle, she not only could get into Hesse's novel, but was carried away by it, her mind now in deep reading mode.

As note above, I have seen what Wolf is describing increasingly not just with my students and in my own recent reading habits, but with friends, one of whom admitted not to have read a novel by another writer in a while. The first person buys books of fiction and nonfiction, but when I ask if they have read them, the reply is, No. In terms of my own reading this spring and summer, I've had to force myself not to set the book aside after a few pages to check email or Twitter or look up something on Google, yet when I have stuck with the books. I get transported into the world of the work. This has been the case with novels and collections of short stories by Tayari Jones, Tommy Orange, Rachel Cusk, Uzodinma Iweala, Matthias Énard, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jamel Brinkley, Celeste Ng, and Beatriz Bracher, to name just a few of them, as well as various longer works I have blurbed or read for judging projects. I enjoyed every last one of them, but initially entering each was more difficult than it ever had been in the past.

So, you might say, Who cares if no one reads long or dense or long, dense works of fiction any more?  What happens if we lose the "cognitive patience" and focus that Wolf argues we may be losing? Hesse's writing and ways of thought may have reached their ends in terms of their possibility of connection--or, to put it more simply--relatability, with contemporary readers. (As someone with a propensity for for dense prose and serpentine syntax, this is not an idle concern.) Even if that's true, what Wolf--like Carr--shows, as prior studies have borne out, is that "deep reading," and the virtual engagement with narratives have powerful, beneficial cognitive effects. One is to foster a capacity for analysis, which texts by Hesse, or the authors I list above, or Marcel Proust, the subject of Wolf's first book, require. To put it another way, every complex work is a kind of detective story, leaving clues the reader must assemble to make sense of the work, even as we are relating it to and contextualizing it with what we already know. The second is a quite powerful feature of fiction writing in particular: empathy. When we enter the minds, perspectives, bodies, and experiences of others in fiction, we connect with them, even if briefly, and this shapes our own views in the wider world. It sounds like hocus-pocus, but it isn't. Literature's emotional power should never be underestimated. But the fact remains, even the simplest works of fiction--and nonfiction--are slow, or at least slower than tiled or laddering screens. You can skip a few sentences or flip a pages ahead but you've probably missed something important--that is, unless you're reading a book like Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (Rayuela), where this is an integral feature of the novel.

Rather than categorically decrying digital reading, what Wolf suggests is that even if it is reshaping our brain and cognition, there is a way, particularly for those with children or teaching and working with them, to ensure that they learn and engage not only with screens, but with books, so that they don't lose the deep reading facility altogether. For adults, will power and a concerted effort to put digital devices away--and turn off TV screens--is probably the easier and best option. Cultivating this "bi-literate" brain is what Wolf is aiming for. How to do this will a challenge for the future, especially how many people cannot pull themselves away from their phones, especially younger ones. I tend to take a gentle approach with my students in terms of their in-class texting, urging them not to do so, but also recognizing that at times they may have a pressing issue they need to address. On the other hand, I also try to remind myself that I, like most people on this earth when I was in school from age 5 to roughly 32 or so, nearly a decade out of the classroom as part of that mix, made it through entire days without 1) ever picking up a telephone unless it was an emergency and 2) only talking about things on a screen, unless we were watching a video or TV program as part of our less, or doing something very specific on a computer required for class. How did we survive? I did, we did, and I place this thought in the forefront of my brain as I close my laptop, shut off my phone, and dive into another book--a novel, a collection of poetry, short stories or essays, a play. But I'll get to that as soon as I post and read a few Tweets, bookmark a YouTube video, watch a few Instagram stories, and look at one more article online....

Shakespeare & Co. To Open New Stores in NYC, Philly

The old Shakespeare & Co.
on Broadway (via Yelp)

Independent bookstores in New York City and elsewhere experienced a fatal period from the late 1990s through the early 2010s. A number of the iconic (Gotham Book Mart, A Different Light,  St. Marks Bookshop, Left Bank Books, Coloseum, Barnes & Noble flagship, etc.) and less well known indies and mini-chains (Posmans, Bent Pages, 12th Street Books, New York Bound Books, Revolution Books, Book Court, etc.) in the city shuttered their doors, sometimes with the promise or at least hope of reopening, and, as was the case with St. Mark's, eventually doing so only to close their doors permanently. Between the assault by larger chains, the exorbitant rental prices, the dip in readers, and other problems, the once bookstore-rich has become a comparative desert over the last 25 years, though some indie bookshops, like McNally-Jackson and Greenlight Books, and chains, like the financially precarious Barnes & Noble have hung on.

One survivor, now under new ownership, that is now on the verge of expanding is Shakespeare & Company. After having shrunk to a single store, its 939 Lexington Avenue space next to Hunter College on the Upper East Side, the holding company that took over the lease for the remaining store and bought its trademark in 2015 now plans to open two new Manhattan stores, one on the Upper West Side at 2020 Broadway (between 69th and 70th Streets), and a new one in the West Village, at 450 6th Avenue, near 11th Street, in what was the old Jefferson Market. Both have planned openings in the fall of 2018. Alongside these new stores, S&Co. also will open a café right outside the Hunter-68th Street 4/5/6 (Green line) train station, at Lexington Ave. and 68th Street. As the press release notes, the UWS store is a homecoming, since the first Shakespeare & Company opened in that neighborhood in 1982 and closed in 1996, but the West Village store will also be a significant return for the bookseller, since its Broadway storefront next to NYU's campus also had a major following up through its closing in 2014. (Other branches, in Brooklyn and on 23rd Street, had also disappeared.)

That branch was one of the first to carry my first book, Annotations, and it also is where I met the Canadian poet, director and intellectual James Oscar Jr., now in Montréal. He worked there, and we used to have long, illuminating conversations about literature, life and everything else. One other significant component of that old Broadway branch was its section featuring British imprints, which it updated and sold at reasonable prices. This is hardly a big deal today, when you can order books from almost everywhere in the world and get them in a reasonable amount of time, but in the mid-to-late 1990s, it was tough to find any bookstores, including most in NYC, that had British versions of US-published books, as well as rare finds that weren't available anywhere else, on the bookshelf. I can think of a number of volumes, including editions of novels by J. G. Ballard, Will Self and Peter Kalu, and several anthologies, that I found there and nowhere else.

The old Shakespeare & Co. on
Broadway, in Manhattan (via Yelp)

In addition to the New York openings, S&Co. plans to open a Philadelphia branch as well, in the Rittenhouse Square area of Center City, at 1632 Walnut Street. This will be the company's first store outside Manhattan. All the stores will have an Espresso Book Machine, which are produced by On Demand Books, a sister subsidiary to Shakespeare & Co. headed by CEO Dane Neller. McNally-Jackson currently has an Espresso Book Machine, which allows visitors not only to print published books on demand, but also self-publish books as well. S&Co. is already experimenting with customizable children's books, and will feature some of the self-published works near the Espresso Book Machines. I've watched books being printed up and have done so once myself at McNally-Jackson, and I find the process and machinery spell-binding. I think it may be a possible way to get Seismosis, now completely sold out and thus out of print, back into readers' hands (at far less than the $50-$100+ it now sells for online.)

One worrisome note is S&Co. CEO Dane Neller's comment that "My vision for Shakespeare & Co. has always been to create the biggest little bookshop in the world." (You can find a longer interview with Publishers Weekly here.) I understand the expansive dreams, but haven't we seen this before, with disastrous results on multiple levels? I immediately think of Barnes & Noble, which became a behemoth and drove many smaller chains and indie stores out of business, only to fall prey itself to an even more massive beast, Amazon, which has undercut bookstores and retailers of all sorts and continues to grow with abandon. Perhaps I'm reading too much into Neller's comments, but I sincerely hope that as the company grows, it takes into account the broader publishing and literary ecology. Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, which covered the closing of the Broadway store, features a brief, positive interview with Neller about the new stores.  My fingers are crossed that this will all work out!

A Few New Interviews

This summer, I had the pleasure of chatting in person with Madison McCartha, who is currently a student in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Madison had previously held conversations other writers, including the amazing Douglas Kearney and Rachel Galvin, to discuss topics under the rubric Polyphone: Interviews with Diasporic Poets. We ranged over all manner of things and people, and I really enjoyed meeting Madison and am looking forward to his work as it appears in the world. Recently the journal Full Stop published the interview, which you can find here. Many thanks to Madison for the excellent questions and thoughts, and to Full Stop for running this discussion.

Here's a snippet:

In an essay on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriett Blog, Ken Chen says he always finds himself “met with troubles [as] to how to fit something infinite like death energy of grief or the death energy of Empires within a box that is finite like a book of poems or a book of fiction.” I’m wondering what has been the difficulty for you in translating the sublime trauma of imperialism, as he calls it, and whether that process (of translation) expanded or complicated your thinking about it?

By all means. It’s extremely difficult, and part of the challenge is presenting it in a way that is comprehensible to people today. Because on one level, yes, we can try to imagine what it would be like to be a black soldier in a battle in the US Civil War. On the other hand, I think it’s quite difficult to ever imagine what that experience was like. I mean consider the multiple layers of precarity that that person was embodying, but also, at the same time, their extraordinary bravery: to put oneself in extraordinary danger, not just for one’s own home but so many others. What does that mean? What does such a radical practice of freedom look like? How do we depict it?

There are multiple ways. Creating scenes, and creating characters, to tap into emotions elusive to us and yet that we know intimately: that is a form of translation. That’s something art can actually do, that other forms of writing can’t, or not exactly. Moreover, there is the question of the larger canvas, of colonialism and empire: how does a fiction writer convey these larger systems and structures without didacting, without essentially writing an essay (though there are hybrid fictional-essay forms that would work well)? What does it mean to put pressure on the usual recourse to the individual, when what we need is this larger backdrop, which tends to go missing in so many of our public discussions?

***

A few years back, perhaps shortly before Counternarratives was published, I met up with writer, scholar and activist Rochelle Spencer to discuss the topics of Afrofuturism and speculative Black writing and poetics, but I'd forgotten about it until she alerted me that our exchange was set to appear in Chicago Literati, and it did this past spring (April). Here's a link to the piece, which Rochelle titled "'Like Currents in a River': A Conversation with Speculative Writer John Keene." Since this discussion occurred before the many since Counternarratives appeared, it was a bit more free-wheeling in many ways. Many thanks to Rochelle (now Dr. Spencer, I believe!) and Chicago Literati for running it.

Here is one Q&A exchange from that conversation that centers on the Black Arts Movement:

RS: You just alluded to the Black Arts Movement. How did the Black Arts Movement influence the Dark Room?

Keene: The DNA of the Black Arts Movement is in every contemporary Black American poet and in Black poets all over the world, whether they acknowledge this influence or not. The ideas of self discovery, black pride, connection, to do something on your own rather than waiting for someone else to do it—those ideas were central to Dark Room Collective writers in their youth, so I feel we wouldn’t have been possible without them, without the crucial well of Black Arts Movement poets. They are invaluable, and they remain invaluable, though people sometimes talk about the Movement as if it failed. I think counter to that: their influence will continue well into the first century and beyond.

***

Lastly, I don't think I'd mentioned on this blog that, by some strange turn of events, Counternarratives finally received a review, two years after its hardcover debut, and a glorious one at that, in The New York Times Book Review this past September. I extend my profound thanks to writer and critic Julian Lucas, who authored the long and insightful review essay, one of the finest and most in depth the book has received. Titled "Epic Stories That Expand the Universal Family Plot," it situates the collection in relation to the history of fictional family sagas in order to show how it performs, as it were, a kind of queer affiliation and relationality, how it embodies a different understanding of history and kinship, that might offer a way forward for the future. (I have decided not to expend any additional energy trying to figure out why the Times completely ignored the book when it appeared in 2015.)

Here is how Lucas ends his review, a fitting tribute to the book and to many who are tending similar literary and artistic gardens:

Entranced by the ancestor who crossed on the Mayflower, escaped from the plantation or started anew in a hostile foreign city, we too often limit our retrospective gaze to those predecessors who made provisions for a future we recognize in our own present. We deprive ourselves of people whose visions were never realized, who left no obvious legacy. More people have lived on earth than the tendentious nets of genealogy — inevitably tangled in the chronologies of faith, race, nation — can catch, and we are connected to them by threads more subtle, and resonances more profound, than have yet been explored. Imagining those lives, deeply and without the prejudice that they must be prologue to our world, can be both radical and beautiful.

New York Art Book Fair

As has been the case for the last few years, I was able to get over to MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens for the annual NY Art Book Fair, one of the largest art-book gatherings in the US. Running for four days, presented primarily by Printed Matter (with a host of sponsors), and featuring over 370 "booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions, and independent publishers from 28 countries," to quote the website, it is always a bonanza for arts-based publishing, and the ideal venue to learn about and find books you might not readily encounter elsewhere. I used to go on the first day, but realized the last day--Sunday--is the best for bargains and smaller crowds. The MTA's usual challenges as well as the Sunday travel schedule meant a slightly more involved journey over to Queens, but once there and on the bus, it was a short hop to the venue, which tends to have as many interesting look people milling around outside it as inside.

Street décollage (on the way there)

A vendor in the domed tent 

A vendor and reader

One of many booths

Last year, I made sure to head to Image Text Ithaca's (ITI) booth to sign copies of GRIND, and they were there again this year, with a number of newly published texts. I had the opportunity to chat with some of the students in their MFA program, as well as with photographer, publisher, ITI co-organizer and my collaborator on GRIND Nicholas Muellner. (I'd just missed author, artist, publisher and ITI co-organizer Catherine Taylor, who'd been there for most of the event.) New Directions, which was there in 2015, skipped this year, though I imagine they'll be back next year with some of their new offerings, including new entries in their pamphlet series. This year, I said I would try to visit every floor, and as many of the rooms and booths as I could handle, within a four-hour window, because the building tends to get a bit toasty and so many exhibits become overwhelming. (This is my strategy for BEA and AWP, etc. also.) In addition, I said that I would not load up on books, or no more than I could fit reasonably fit in one book bag, and I stuck to my vow, bringing back lots of cards, but fewer books and works of art than in the past.

The bustling courtyard

One of the vendor areas, off
MoMA PS1's main courtyard 

The geodesic domed tent

A room wallpapered with
images of uteruses

A closeup of the wallpaper 

At a booth where I found some great
photos last year

I'm always fascinated by the mix of vendors at the NY Art Book Fair. You have pretty high end university presses, like Yale, for example, and tiny publishers who clearly are a one-person operation.  Those booths and books are often some of the funnest to check out, because the work often is highly original and a labor of love, though I imagine everyone at the fair wants to at least make back the fees for exhibiting, and to develop regular readers and subscribers (for the magazines and zines). Another publisher I always look for is Song Cave, helmed by poet Alan Felsenthal and others.  As in the past, they were in the geodesic dome, with their trove of new and backlist titles. One especially intriguing book of theirs I picked up was an edited volume of Subcommandante Marcos's writings, Professionals of Hope, with an afterward by Gabriela Jauregui, which read like (some of the best overtly political) poetry and philosophy.

Free posters ("WAS WAR WON")

Art and books and viewers 

This gentleman was selling the
controversial and discredited
Black Panthers Coloring Book,
produced not by the Black Panthers
but by the FBI to discredit them
(the book is actually pretty fascinating)

Photography books for sale

The image I that from a distance
I at first thought was a window!

More photographs for sale

One of the things I've noticed over the last few years is that the vendor base is diversifying somewhat, with more (especially young) artists and publishers of color and queer creative figures. This always means that if I can go slowly enough through the booths and displays I'll find some gems I would not see elsewhere. There are also art exhibits, but I chose to skip most of the freestanding ones this time, and booksignings, which I also skipped unless the artist or writer was there at the table. There probably are readings and conversations. I think I'll try to catch some of these next year, because if I'm in town, I will make every effort to be back!

Aperture's table

Brownbook

In one of the large upstairs rooms

Nathaniel Otting, at left, and
books and zines for days!

Nathaniel and a bookseller,
from the Philadelphia area (though
I think he said he's now in NYC,
but the store is still in Philly) 

Door display

Gregory R. Miller & Co.

He signed a card I bought 

Another room bursting with books of all kinds

Delicious zines!

Book Expo America 2017

Part of my book haul (I had Sinclair's
book, so now I have an extra copy)

In 2013 I wrote about my first visit to Book Expo America (BEA), which I'd heard about but never attended. Or had the opportunity to attend, as I usually was in Chicago and Evanston in the spring while BEA was running in New York City. (Ironically BEA initially began in Chicago, though before my time there.) I returned the following year, and then BEA returned to Chicago (and my knees began acting up), so I ended up taking a few years' hiatus from this massive publishing fair. Oddly enough, I did not go either year that Counternarratives appeared, either in hardcover (2015) or paperback (2016) version, though I believe I made up for it by attending a wide array of other book events, from AWP to the Brooklyn Book Fair. In any case, I also gave myself a short reprieve on gorging on free books, which is one of the great benefits of BEA, and a chief reason that, as I witnessed during my prior visits, so many attendees arrive and depart with suitcases, roller bags, and other large mobile containers to haul as many books back home--for their own libraries, public and private ones--as possible.

This year I decided to drop by the Javits Center on the festival's final day primarily to see several events my friend David Barclay Moore was scheduled to participate in. David's debut book, The Stars Beneath Our Feet, is a Middle Grade novel set to appear this September from Random House, and as part of the book launch he was on several panels, including one for "Buzz Authors" (writers singled out as likely to create a buzz among readers this year), and  also participated in a single author book signing in Random House's ample, skillfully arranged publisher's area. (Congratulations again, Dave!) I did get to see David speak about his book with other Middle Grade authors, learning something about the genre in the process, and it was also fun to watch him receive VIP treatment with his book signing, which required a ticket to get in line. When I got to his book signing table, I related the following conversation to him:

Woman #1 (in line across from mine, to her friend, Woman #2): Who are you going to see?
Woman #2 (in line in front of me): David Barclay Moore.
Woman #1: What did he write?
Woman #2: The Stars Beneath Our Feet. Who are you going to see?
Woman #1: Lawrence O'Donnell. The TV show host, on MSNBC.
Woman #2: Oh, OK. Tell him I said hello!

Between David's panel and book-signing, and again towards the end of the afternoon, I wandered around the floor, taking in the various booths and designated sections. I did get to see a bit of Lawrence O'Donnell's conversation with Ed Asner, but unlike at the two previous BEAs, where I happened upon Congressman John Lewis, Tracy Letts, Dick Cavett, and others, they were among the very few already famous people I encountered, and I did not step over the cordon to introduce myself to either one. This year the people at the elite university press booths were indifferent at best, or outright ignored me, but since it was the last day of BEA--with Book Con, a book fan-focused gathering at which books are not free--I followed etiquette by asking whether I could take books, and, receiving neither positive nor negative response, I helped myself to a few. Quite a few clusters of people--agents, booksellers, people selling various services (audio rights, etc.)--were huddled at tables all over the place, so the book business writers and certainly most readers rarely see or think about was clearly on display.

At other presses, particularly the smaller university presses, the non-US ones, and the indies, as well as publishers of graphic texts, comics, children's books, etc., the representatives were very friendly, and I ended up collecting roughly a sizable box's worth, which I hauled around at first in my arms until I commandeered one of the rare book bags I could find--most had already been snapped up, I think, over the previous two days and Friday morning--and then mailed straight to my Rutgers office. I won't detail all the books I picked up, but I will mention one book I did grab, after of course asking and not receiving a "No, don't take it": Chris Kraus's new biography of Kathy Acker, simply titled After Kathy Acker. I had to get this book because I was an enthusiastic reader of Acker's work in my youth, and having read and nearly taught Kraus's I Love Dick, and then having watched Jill Soloway's quirky but addictive TV version, I am now on a sort of Kraus kick, if you can call it that. (I taught Kraus's 2013 novel/memoir Aliens and Anorexia as part of a graduate workshop in the spring of 2016. Some of the students loved it, a few absolutely hated it, but it provoked passionate responses in both cases.)

In general I was looking for another literary diamond, one of those texts I'd happened upon before at BEA, like Craig Steven Wilder's Ebony and Ivy, which rocked my world when I brought it home and read it, and which has gone on to become one of the signal texts of the last few years. I did pick up some gems, including Jordan Abel's Injun (Talonbooks) and Hoa Nguyen's Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books), both of which made the Canadian shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and hope to get to some of them before the summer slides into fall. Perhaps because I went on Friday as opposed to the first or second day, and perhaps because it was the afternoon rather than the morning, the fair felt a bit subdued. Certainly some of the booths, like W. W. Norton's, where New Directions' books would usually be, featured shelves stripped bare--by readers, I think--and though I did pass lines for book signings, they were not anything like I remembered in the past. The FedEx office where I mailed my books was packed, though, and as one of the photos below shows, those suitcases were brimming too. Perhaps next year I'll aim to catch more of the readings and events, and maybe I'll bring a suitcase or roller bag. Or maybe not.

David Barclay Moore and his fellow Middle Grade
Buzz Authors: Kamilla Benko, The Unicorn Quest: The Whisper in the Stone;
Molly Ostertag, The Witch Boy; Eucabeth Odhiambo, Auma's Long Run; and
Jake Burt, Greetings From Witness Protection!

Dave, Kamilla and Molly

Filmmaker Ndlela Nkobi, another friend,
recording the panel for posterity

David and fellow Middle Grade authors

One of the displays

The Confucius Institute's books

London Review of Books (LRB) booth

African American Expressions booth

Columbia University Press, Princeton UP, etc.

New books signing tables

Skincare treatments for book lovers

Barron's financial press books

A kiosk with a book signing behind it

Ed Asner (center) and Lawrence O'Donnell (right)

Printing Korea booth

Counterpoint Press/Catapult/Soft Skull
(with one of my incoming student's first
novel prominently displayed above the
head of the man at right!)

Some great books from Coffee House
Press and others (Dawn Lundy Martin's stunner
Good Stock Strange Blood among them)

From Talonbooks

The line for Dave's book signing

Random House scanning badges
 for the book signing

David signing books for his brother
and niece, in from Atlanta

Directing readers to another book signing

David Funches, of Lion Forge Press

Books by Olive Senior and others
(they would not gift me with these)

Graywolf's offerings (including a new
book by Danez Smith)

Kevin Hart, in cardboard form

Readers, checking out books

A subsequent panel, featuring designer
Zac Posen (at right)

This booth had something to do with
L. Ron Hubbard, I think,
hence the person in the costume

Harvard theorist Danielle
Allen's new nonfiction book
about her cousin, Cuz

Packing those suitcases!

The Javits Center Atrium at the end of the day