Charlie Arrowsmith Obituary – Death: digger, listener, runner; senior editor Charlie Arrowsmith harlow Cause Of Death
The annual Small Press (SPF) event was held on August 20th at the Grand Army branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where the Mobile Book Cart was rolled into the lobby. The event attracted hundreds of book lovers, including regulars from the weekly farmers market held across the street, who mingled with intellectuals from all over Brooklyn. The event has grown exponentially since it debuted nine years ago, with over 30 vendors, including independent publishers, magazines, and printers such as One Story, n+1, and A Public Space. The SpeakEasy staff kept seeing familiar faces from Reckless Books and Archipelago editors passing by.
Unlike most mobile book outreach events where new books are given away for free to communities in need, SPF provides a rare book sale opportunity, and some of the proceeds go directly to outreach programs throughout the year, embodied in Bookmobile itself. Greenlight Books is a partner that provides low-priced books for budget-conscious readers.
This year’s event featured repertoires from writers who recently performed on SpeakEasy’s serious entertainment show at Joe’s Pub in the East Village, such as “Greenland” by David Santos Donaldson, “Smiles and Love Poems in Quarantine” by Sarah Ruhl, Zakia Delilah Harris, and other writers featured on stage and in schools, such as Mira Jacob’s Good Talk memoir at Joe’s in January 2020.
The response from visitors to the various books on display was impressive. On the fiction side, Xochitl Gonzalez’s Olga Dies Dreaming, about a 30-year-old wedding planner and her brother against the backdrop of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, was particularly popular. The truck rack had Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Grace Lavery’s memoir Please Miss: A Heartbreaking and Shocking Work of Penis was published, which thrilled the writer of this piece, as Grace wrote for Seriously earlier this year and is a professor at their alma mater.
