Virtual Festival Day

You don’t need to be in Brooklyn to experience Festival events. Wherever you are on the planet, you can enjoy the Brooklyn Book Festival virtual programs. Among this year’s Virtual Festival authors are Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Maggie Haberman, Portuguese novelist and essayist Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, NYT bestselling author Chloe Benjamin, among many others. The Brooklyn Book Festival continues to embrace the transformative impact of bringing together authors from across the nation and globe to inform contemporary conversations.If you can’t wait, please visit our Video Archive and check out past Festival programs.

Virtual Festival Day
September 20, 2026
12:00 pm

Comics

Witness: International Comics Documenting War and Genocide

In the face of denial, misinformation, and erasure, art and journalism can force confrontation with the reality of the world we share. In Nadine Takvorian’s Armaveni, a young Nadine quizzes her relatives, gradually piecing together her family’s story of surviving the Armenian genocide. In Welcome To Hell: From the West Bank to Gaza, editorial cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh illustrates his brother’s incarceration and torture in an Israeli prison, and the news from friends in Gaza during the 2023 Israeli bombardment. In Red Stones, Ernesto Saade tells the story of a young girl who lived through the Salvadoran civil war and sought to protect her village. Join us for a conversation about preserving the stories of people living through oppression and the resilience that inspires hope for freedom. Moderated by literary agent Anjali Singh.

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Free

2026-09-20 12:00:00
September 20

12:00pm

Witness: International Comics Documenting War and Genocide

September 20, 2026
12:00 pm

Fiction / Non-Fiction

Call of Games presented by NYU

Video games offer a form of storytelling that has lured in countless authors, from playing obsessively in their childhood to incorporating video game influences in their books. Join novelist and co-editor of Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games J. Robert Lennon, novelist and editor Jeanne Thornton (A/S/L), and fiction and nonfiction author Ander Monson (Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession) for a conversation about how games and novels intersect, influence each other, and expand the mediums. Moderated by Harold Goldberg, NYT columnist and author of The Skinny.

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Free

2026-09-20 12:00:00
September 20

12:00pm

Call of Games presented by NYU

September 20, 2026
1:00 pm

Fiction / International

On Vastness and Being: Latin American Authors in Conversation / De la inmensidad de ser: Autores latinoamericanos en conversación

On Vastness and Being: Latin American Authors in Conversation 

From Chile, Daniela Catrileo’s short story collection Piñen (trans. Jacob Edelstein) illuminates the lives of young Mapuche people, navigating the joys and tragedies of the urban Indigenous experience in South America. In Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun (trans. by Sarah Booker), set in near-future Ecuador, Mónica Ojeda draws us into the lives of two friends, and their hallucinatory journey towards a collective Andean future. Simón López Trujillo, author of Pedro the Vast (trans. by Robin Myers), imagines an electrifying fungal response to humanity’s intrusions into the natural world. Each work tackles the vastness of being with rigor, ferocity, and uniquely electrifying prose. Moderated by writer and curator Lily Philpott. This program will be presented in Spanish.

 

De la inmensidad de ser: Autores latinoamericanos en conversación 

Desde Chile, la colección Piñen (traducido a inglés por Jacob Edelstein) de Daniela Catrileo ilumina las vidas de jóvenes Mapuche, investigando las alegrías y tragedias de la experiencia indígena de la comunidad urbana sudamericana. En Electric Shamans of the Festival of the Sun (traducida a inglés por Sarah Booker), situada en un Ecuador del futuro cercano, la obra de Mónica Ojeda está llena de poesía y ella nos jala dentro las vidas de dos amigos y su viaje alucinatorio al futuro de un colectivo andino. Serán acompañadas por Simón Lopez Trujillo, autor de Pedro the Vast (traducida a inglés por Robin Myers), una obra hipnótica que imagina una respuesta fúngica e electrizante a las intrusiones humanidades al mundo natural. Cada obra trata con la inmensidad de la vida y de ser con rigor,  ferocidad y prosa de manera única y electrizante. Este panel va a ser presentado en español. Moderado por Lily Philpott, autora y curadora.  

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Free

2026-09-20 13:00:00
September 20

1:00pm

On Vastness and Being: Latin American Authors in Conversation / De la inmensidad de ser: Autores latinoamericanos en conversación

September 20, 2026
1:00 pm

Fiction

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

There are stories we tell to make sense of ourselves, but what happens when those stories veer from the script? In Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Where Are You Really From: Stories, characters find themselves caught between fact and fiction, confronting döppelgangers, self-deception, desire, and the gap between the stories we tell and the truths beneath them. In Larissa Pham’s Discipline, a novelist who has transformed a damaging relationship with her former professor into a revenge fantasy must reckon with controllingl the narrative. And in Chloe Benjamin’s Under Story, a scientist at an isolated Antarctic research station becomes convinced that a mysterious phenomenon might allow her to turn back the clock and rewrite the story of her life. Chou, Pham, and Benjamin examine the narratives we construct to survive, the truths that resist those narratives, and the complicated question of how much authorship we can ever have over the stories that make us who we are. Moderated by Tajja Isen (Tough Love).

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Free

2026-09-20 13:00:00
September 20

1:00pm

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

September 20, 2026
2:00 pm

Fiction / International

Who? New! International

Each season, BKBF presents several international debut authors whom we want to shine the light on for our audience. This year we present Palestinian writer Sara Abou Ghazal (Dream of Ayn Ara), Teme-Augama Anishnabai professor Tyson Stewart (The Return of the Nish), Kurdish writer Agri Ismaïl (Hyper), and Azerbaijani poet Egana Djabbarova (My Dreadful Body trans. Lisa C. Hayden).

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Free

2026-09-20 14:00:00
September 20

2:00pm

Who? New! International

September 20, 2026
2:00 pm

Food / Non-Fiction

50 Years of Complete Techniques and The Taste of Country Cooking

In 1976, Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques detailed and democratized the foundations of French cooking for an American audience, and Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking proclaimed the beauty and bounty of local, seasonal Southern food as one of the world’s great cuisines. Join Toni Tipton-Martin, culinary historian and author of a new foreword for the 50th anniversary edition of The Taste of Country Cooking, and Rollie Wesen, Professor of Food Studies and Culinary Arts and Founder and Executive Director of the Jacques Pepin Foundation, for a conversation on the lasting impact of both of these books across both home and professional kitchens. Moderated by culture writer and cookbook co-author Osayi Endolyn.

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Free

2026-09-20 14:00:00
September 20

2:00pm

50 Years of Complete Techniques and The Taste of Country Cooking

September 20, 2026
3:00 pm

Fiction / International

Strangers in a Strange Land

There are many ways to be made to feel like an outsider. In Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong a transplant to the big city of Bombay learns to find her footing — and sense of self — navigating the train lines that criss-cross the city and country. While in A. Igoni Barrett’s satirical Whyteface, a Nigerian man who has woken up white experiences Europe differently, asking himself what it means to be African outside Africa. And in Ananda Devi’s All Flesh (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman), a young girl’s body itself becomes a source of ridicule and estrangement. How does one reconcile these alien worlds? Moderated by Andy Tepper, curator of international literature at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh.

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Free

2026-09-20 15:00:00
September 20

3:00pm

Strangers in a Strange Land

September 20, 2026
3:00 pm

Fiction / Non-Fiction

Ruler of the Ruins: Absolute Power and the Breaking of America

Join Pulitzer Prize-winning NYT journalist Maggie Haberman (Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, co-authored by Jonathan Swan) and National Book Award-winning author George Packer (The Emergency) for a cross-genre conversation about unfettered executive power and institutional erosion in an age of polarization. Combining Packer’s allegorical lens of fictional societal collapse with Haberman’s unsparing forensic reporting on the dismantling of our democratic infrastructure, the authors go far beyond standard political talking points. The two thinkers will map the terrifying intersection where top-down political consolidation meets a bottom-up fracturing of our shared American reality. Leading the conversation is Anand Giridharadas (Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City), who brings his own vital perspective on civic fracture and renewal.

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Free

2026-09-20 15:00:00
September 20

3:00pm

Ruler of the Ruins: Absolute Power and the Breaking of America

September 20, 2026
4:00 pm

Fiction

The Things We Inherit

The consequences of one generation’s choices can become the inheritance of the next. In De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s The Fervent Whites, the return of a couple wrongfully imprisoned for murder unsettles a Hudson Valley community. In Harriet Clark’s The Hill, a young girl grows up visiting her mother in prison, caught between a grandmother who condemns her daughter’s radical past and a mother who wants her daughter to be free from its consequences. In Jasmin Iolani Hakes’s The Pōhaku, generations of women inherit the responsibility of protecting an ancient stone and the history it carries, confronting the wounds of displacement and the enduring ties between family, place, and identity. Winslow, Clark, and Hakes explore the ways the past persists in families and communities, shaping the lives of those who inherit its secrets, convictions, and wounds—and ask whether we can ever escape the histories we did not choose. Moderated by writer and National Book Critics Circle board member, Lauren LeBlanc.

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Free

2026-09-20 16:00:00
September 20

4:00pm

The Things We Inherit

September 20, 2026
4:00 pm

Fiction / International

Does Colonialism Ever End?

What does it mean to describe colonialism as past when its borders, hierarchies, violence, and silences continue to shape the present—and even imagined futures? Bringing together Karim Kattan’s Eden at Dawn, and Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory,  the authors examine literature’s power to expose the enduring structures of domination dating back to the colonial era and into the imaginary future. These books explore resistance, complicity, memory, and survival. Together, the authors question whether a genuine rupture is possible with the past, or whether enduring structures and institutions continue to control and determine the future. Moderated by writer and translator Jeremy Tiang.

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Free

2026-09-20 16:00:00
September 20

4:00pm

Does Colonialism Ever End?

Presented by Brooklyn Book Festival, Inc. and Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council

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Cultural and Programming Partners

Brooklyn Law School
Brooklyn Public Library
The Center for Black Literature at MEC
The Center for Fiction
MTA Arts & Design
National Book Foundation
The New York Review Of Books
NYU
Poetry Society Of America
St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture