By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
At Frankfurt Book Fair: Reaching for the “New Book”
[dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]S[/dropcap]urrounded by booths and pavilions that proudly showed off drop-dead handsome book covers, looming famous-author faces, and branding, branding, branding, the “Sprint Beyond the Book” ensemble was subtly subversive.
After all, they weren’t selling anything. And while they weren’t shy about showing their own logo to announce that the Arizona State University-based Center for Science and the Imagination was in residence, there were no café-sized deal-making tables. Unless I missed them, no tote bags, either.
Just one table with a group of five or six people at any given time, hunched over their laptops writing fast and trying to concentrate while Frankfurt’s booming city of publishing roared around them. (Hall 8.0 was so loud that by Friday I was losing my voice from talking with folks over the din.)
This is not something Jonathan Franzen should read. What’s going on here reminds me of the restless, sometimes fretful experimentation in theatrical work that Peter Brook did at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris and Anne Bogart and Martha Clarke have done in New York. it doesn’t always hang together. And no one really has the overview. The action is on the ground.
Read the full article at JaneFriedman.com