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McNally Jackson Is Starting a Book Festival
The city’s big little indie-bookstore chain is betting on the idea that readers want something more than the standard launch party.
The first festival, a slate of events organized around the idea of archives, historiography, and legacies, is a sprawling affair: It will run from May 7 into June, with a series of talks, a print zine, and a phone-free closing party (involving “a secret lineup” and a musical guest) at newly hip Irish pub T.J. Byrnes in the Financial District. The festival, founder and owner Sarah McNally says, is a way to give people “more access to high-level intellectual conversations in the city” between poets, fiction writers, and memoirists — “the usual subjects for bookstore events” — but also “architects, or academic historians, or journalists.” For some, authors will be joined by a relevant expert or two who have not published a book themselves, as with a talk on Hilma af Klint between biographer Julia Voss and Jodi Hauptman, a MoMA curator. The lineup this spring, planned in collaboration with the authors themselves, includes Annie Rauwerda, who runs the Depths of Wikipedia, with artist Michael Mandiberg and journalist Stephen Harrison; a conversation on criticism between New York Times critic Parul Sehgal and New York ’s Andrea Long Chu; and a discussion about literary friendship with Lincoln Michel, Helen Phillips, Chloe Cooper Jones, and Kevin Nguyen.
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