Anyone seeking evidence that the written word is going strong should book it to Charleston every November. The past month is proof positive that the peninsula teems with tome-toting bibliophiles lining up or spilling out of festivals and bookstores.
And when three festivals converged over the weekend of Nov. 14-16, it made a strong statement about the current allure and abiding agency of reading. In fact, it’s strong enough that I move we dub November as Charleton’s official literary month.
Charleston Literary Festival
From Nov. 7 to Nov. 16, the Charleston Literary Festival served up a slew of conversations, deftly pairing moderators and writers in organic exchanges, with Ladybird Books serving as the official bookseller.
You never know what words will drop. U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., lent insight to his book, The First Eight: A Personal Histpry of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation, and the power of one vote. Recalling the 1866 court decisions interpreting civil rights in suppressive ways, he cautioned, “We may be headed in that direction if this is not corrected soon.”
CNN lead Washington anchor Jake Tapper discussed his book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, noting U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “insane” requirements for journalists at the Pentagon.
“The call is coming from inside the house,” he said.
Beyond politics, the wide-ranging festival considered Jane Austen’s Bookshelf and the agency of women authors, with author Rebecca Romney. Patricia Alschul of the reality television series Southern Charm and author of Eat, Drink and Remarry, advising an audience member that the best way to attract a man is to “build your life so you don’t need them.”
The New Yorker magazine was front-and-center with fiction editor Deborah Treisman as well as its staff writer Adam Gopnik, who crossed over to theater with his absorbing one-man-show, Talk Therapy. He later discussing an opera commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA with author Stephen Greenblatt based on his book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
Novels had their moment, too. Novelist Gary Shteyngart, a Russian emigre, boiled down his connecton to Korean-Americans to “a love of intense academics and cabbage.” Mid-festival, the prestigious Booker Prize anointed this year’s winner, Flesh, in the days just ahead of highlighting its author David Szalay.
YALLFest
You might call King Street the spine of the activity, with its accelerating swell of bookstores, some selling at the festivals.
Radiating from Blue Bicycle Books at 420 King St., throngs of beaming YALLFest readers from tweens to mid-thirties formed orderly lines. Around 5,000 strong, they came from all over.
“These are the future of readers,” said Jonathan Sanchez, owner of Blue Bicycle and founder of YALLFest. Sales were up from last year, and a big draw was romantasay. Headliners were bestselling authors Marissa Meyer and Rebecca Ross. Charleston’s own horror scribe Grady Hendrix promoted his acclaimed Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.
“The thing about our fans is they’re the hardest working fans,” he said. “They get here at 4 in the morning. They bring equipment. They bring spreadsheets.”
A read on Food & Wine Classic Charleston
Books dominated the Food & Wine Classic Charleston, too, with lines snaking from the Charleston Visitors Center’s Camden Room, where signings featured cookbook authors like Chef Andrew Zimmern of The Blue Food Cookbook and television personality Valerie Bertinelli of Indulge.
At a cooking demonstration, Southern Living Lifestyle Editor Ivy Odom was joined by Academy Award-winning film star Regina King. The pair cheerily chatting while dredging chicken thighs in seasoned flour for a fried chicken sandwich recipe from Odom’s My Southern Kitchen.
Samples were served to guests, perfectly paired with a lively orange wine from King’s new label, Mianyou.
Polly Buxton, owner of Buxton Books, the official bookseller for Food & Wine Classic Charleston, said it was exciting to see how it all came together to create synergy around town.
She said she found herself giving a lift to celebrated New York Chef Kwame Onwuachi of Tatiana, author of Notes From a Young Black Chef: A Memoir, and Chef Alexander Smalls of The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa, who signed copies for her bookstore.
“Kwame was very happily eating some local red rice in the back of my car,” she said. “He and Alexander were talking about its west African origins as Jollof Rice, named after the Wolof tribe of Gambia and Senegal.”
Literary locale
On Nov. 13, Smalls pregamed the Classic at the literary festival, in conversation with Food & Wine editor Hunter Lewis.
The crowd was then treated to a surprise trumpet solo of “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing” from Porgy & Bess performed by Charleston’s Charlton Singleton. Smalls, who is a trained
opera singer, smiled warmly and gloriously joined.
That opera itself sprung from local literary soil, based on DuBose Heyward’s Charleston novel Porgy, which this year marks its centenary.
With such resonant reads and readers, it is clear that, in this city, the written word is no sometime thing. Let’s make it an official November tradition.
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