Decatur Book Festival Open Thread
Decatur Metro | August 30, 2014 | 10:43 am
Use this post to tell us your favorite talks and events at this weekend’s Decatur Book Fest!
It’s a gonna be a fun – potentially soggy – couple of days!
Use this post to tell us your favorite talks and events at this weekend’s Decatur Book Fest!
It’s a gonna be a fun – potentially soggy – couple of days!
At Home in Decatur
At Home in Decatur
Rival
Proud Mama
brianc
Chris Billingsley
New Scott
The Walrus
The Walrus
Steve
brianc
Bill W
Looking Back: The 2011 Atlanta Snowpocalypse
Added a pic of the LSOS book bus along West Ponce. Surprisingly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in the flesh!
I hadn’t seen it yet! How adorable!!
Little Shop is working with Decatur Makers on the conversion. The signage just got done on Thursday. The bus rocks!
After so many years, I finally get the DBF. Today I attended 3 author talks and it was amazing. Saw some old friends and had several interesting conversations. The DBF Rocks! This is an event worth staying home for, the key is listening to the authors, they are very inspiring. It takes dedication and deep thought to be a successful author.
I had a great time at the DBF today!
Unless it is much cooler, I hope attendees will leave their dogs at home tomorrow.
I saw some very miserable pooches there today.
We had a great time at DBF yesterday. Probably the least amount of time I’ve spent outdoors at one of these, maybe a total of 20 minutes, and we were there from 11 till 10. Between my wife and I we attended 5 author events. Waited out the rain at Mac McGees and then later had a great dinner at Makan. Ready to do it all over again.
It was so nice to see so many kids (including my own) so excited about books instead of screens 😉 I loved seeing kids walking around reading their freshly autographed books. We are one lucky town to have such a fantastic festival!
Ditto what everyone else said.
Saw my first Write Club Atlanta at the Bitter Southerner’s Ball for Y’all last night, and can’t believe I’ve waited this long. The Chuck Reece (Bitter)/Doug Monroe (Sweet) battle was epic and hilarious I plan to check out one of their monthly shows at the Highland Ballroom.
Glad you enjoyed it! We’ve been after Chuck for a while, so it was great having him compete with his old friend.
Our next show in ordinary time is Wednesday Sept. 10. Award-winning playwright Topher Payne (Perfect Arrangement, Angry Fags) and director Dave Bruckner (V.H.S., The Signal) are among our combatants. More here: https://www.facebook.com/events/682325898509827/
I’m not much of a reader.
No worries.
Love that guy. Reminds me of my grandfather and his era.
Agree with all enthusiastic comments!!! DBF is like listening to a series of TED talks! And you don’t have to read to enjoy writers and readers talking about interesting ideas! We are indeed lucky!
DBF is like taking really neat courses at college without having to write papers or take exams.
It’s been a great DBF so far. The heat is miserable, but at least there’s shade and overpriced lemonade.
LSoS gave a yuge effort this year, reaching out to schools and getting kids excited about books. Nothing that store does ever seems self-serving, and even though these efforts help their sales, it always seems like they put more into the community than they get from it.
As a native New Yorker, I really enjoyed Bill Buzbee’s discussion of his book Fighting Westway, which is a great story of the triumph of citizen activism versus the extremely powerful when Cuomo, Koch, D’Amato, Reagan and the unions decided that part of the Hudson River should be filled in for a superhighway and real estate development in the late 70s. Karen Abbott’s talk about her book Liar Temptress Soldier Spy was great fun and has put that book on the top of my to read list, despite poor acoustics in the Gym. Alan Gurganus’s reading from Local Souls was quite terrific, and the Q&A afterwards very stimulating. Kate Sweeney on her book American Afterlife was surprisingly funny, and she has great takes on the rituals surrounding death in America.
My only disappointment was Pat Conroy’s appearance with his wife and their friends the Graubarts. The questions were banal and drew very simple answers with little or no insight. The crowd chortled heartily at everything Conroy said whether it was funny or not.
Daren and his crew? What can I say? What an impressive accomplishment, one that just keeps getting better every year. I passed on a trip tp the Gulf Coast and a Jason Isbell concert for this, and will likely stay home for Labor Day weekend as long as the DBF is held then.
At this point, I have more sympathy for Pat Conroy’s dad than for Pat Conroy.
Ha.
For those who couldn’t make it to Jonah McDonald’s “Hiking Atlanta’s Hidden Forests…” presentation (it filled up well before the start time), he’ll be at the Southern Order of Storytellers fest in January (or so I was told), His was easily one of the most entertaining presentations I attended this year, which surprised me somewhat since his book is essentially a guidebook. BTW, copies of it sold out at the festival before his appearance.
BrianC, I hope he does come and I can see him then. My only criticism of DBF is that it’s too hard to choose which presentations to attend because the choices are so great! I skipped
His session for the Messy Baker. I did get a homemade Oreo though, so it wasn’t a bad call.
Did Jonah’s new baby make an appearance?
Not that I know of, although I heard one crying for a moment before the mother and baby left the auditorium.
Gurganus was great. It seems like there aren’t as many of the old Southern Gentlemen authors reading at the DBF in the last couple of years as there were in the beginning. Or at least they aren’t on the stage together cutting up. Ron Rash’s keynote was good too.
Michael Pitre reading “Fives and Twenty-Fives” was very good — a book about Marines fixing pot-holes in Iraq told from three different first person narrators.
But probably the most entertaining talk I saw was David McRaney on “You Are Now Less Dumb”. I spent a couple of hours on his website last night and will definitely get that and his first book, “You Are Not So Smart”. They are all about the many ways we all mislead and sabotage ourselves despite our best intentions.
The Possum Hunters were great too.
I also attended the the Michael Pitre reading and the David McRaney one. I was intrigued by the former’s on-the-spot response to the audience question about the events in Ferguson, though I wondered if he lost some of the audience with his fairly blunt criticism of police tactics there.
As for the latter, “You Are Now Less Dumb” is an interesting book and I really enjoyed the author’s presentation. That whole “survivor bias” thing is a tough one to overcome in our thinking, and the examples he gave were instructive. But as for one of the other fallacies he mentioned, I’m still finding it hard to believe that almost 40% of college freshman believe eyes work like lasers!
Does anyone know who runs the fried catfish booth? It was great and I would like to find them again before the next DBF. Thanks.
Ask Katie Abel.
There was a booth run by people pretending to be hot chicks talking to me on the internet? Wow. Just what will Daren and the DBF folks think of next…
That’s the second inquiry I’ve seen about these catfish. Were they in the “food court” on East Court Square or were they down by the new Kitchen Stage on N. McDonough south of Trinity? And please, Katie wears a lot of hats but not that of food vendor wrangler if she can help it.
Decaturite Mom: The vendor selling catfish was Cynthia Henderson- CJ’s Food Fantasy- Her catfish and her chicken fingers are both excellent and she is a super nice lady.
But it’s a food truck and it comes and goes.
Parker Cross: Thanks for the info on the catfish. The stand I went to was by the courthouse on East Court Square. Wonderful. Now I just have to find a good truck. I googled it and found a phone number, but did not get an answer. Will try again. Thanks so much.
I wonder why Decatur doesn’t have food trucks on a regular basis.