It’s that time of year again, when citizens of the publishing world from all over the country pack up their tote bags and slip into their clogs for the long trek to the westernmost reaches of Midtown to attend BookExpo America (B.E.A.). This week, the 675,000 square-foot Javits convention center is filled with books and the people who create and sell them—it’s “the Lollapalooza of quietly reading to yourself,” Stephen Colbert joked. (Many attendees, summoned to the gray Javits labyrinth from the cozy precincts of book-cluttered offices, look momentarily stunned when they enter.) And, though everyone grumbles about the hectic schedule of presentations and meetings, the mood was expectant. Grownups at the fair.

This year, the Russian Arts Festival, which is attached to the B.E.A., lends the event a note of literary gravitas—panels on the Solzhenitsyn Archive, hosted by Natalia Solzhenitsyn (Aleksander’s wife), and on major new biographies of Stalin, sit alongside “Migrating from Flash to HTML5” and “Maximize eBook Discovery & Sell.” I went down to the Javits to check out the scene, gather intelligence, and see if I could find some Russians to talk to.

Monday, June 4th, 4:15 P.M.: Buzz / The B.E.A. Is for Lovers

First stop was a panel on “buzzy” books for the fall season—buzz-worthiness having been awarded, it seemed, by John Evans, a trim, eloquent man who is the buyer for Diesel books, and the host of the panel. (Booksellers are the royals of the B.E.A.: publishers rely on them to anoint good books in a way that Amazon never can—“hand sell” was the recurring phrase.) He had assembled six editors to tell a room full of about two hundred and fifty people why they should drop everything and read one of these books—most of them by first-time or relatively unknown writers.

I was struck once again by how much book editing is about salesmanship. The panelists were smooth, practiced talkers—convincing, too. Millicent Bennett from Free Press presented a memoir by Susannah Cahalan, “Brain on Fire,” about an autoimmune disease that plunged her into temporary madness. It turns out that thousands of people who have the disease are misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. It also turns out (hypochondriacs beware) that Cahalan may have contracted it because someone sneezed on her on the subway.

Next up was Trish Todd, from Simon & Schuster, with “In the Shadow of Banyan,” a novel about a young girl’s imaginative inner life and her experiences—based in part on the writer’s own—during the Cambodian genocide (she is accidentally responsible for her father’s death). Todd compared the book to “The Diary of Anne Frank.” At the end of her talk, she produced the rice pot the author’s family had hidden their jewels in, which Todd said she kept on her desk to urge herself forward as she edited the book. Sold.

Eccentricity, idiosyncratic narrators, quixotic interior journeys and ones born of political necessity—these are the themes this season. Meanwhile, a tableau of strangeness unfolded before my very eyes: in the back of the crowded room, a man in a drab suit, noticing the bedraggled state of his female companion’s hair, produced a comb from his pocket and swiftly smoothed it. He replaced the comb and put a protective arm around her. Time for all these weary travellers to call it a night.

Tuesday, June 5th, 11 A.M.: To the Booths!

Riding the escalator up to the main exhibitions—thousands of booths set up by publishers, from Assouline to the Zagat, stocked with their wares for the fall season—I was reminded of the excitement of my annual school book fair. Except that took place in a small, wood-floored gym, and this was in a gargantuan room resembling the Starship Enterprise. Despite its size, the air at the fair was balmy and stale from the rush of bodies—schmoozing, waiting in lines, nosing into the next booth. With some furtive glancing at name tags—everyone at the B.E.A. wears them on a ribbon around their neck—I spied agents from New York, writers from Salt Lake City, and booksellers from Virginia. Most of the booths are modest, makeshift rooms, where one can browse the cardboard shelves and perhaps sit for a short breather, but the big trade publishers (Norton, Penguin, HarperCollins, and Amazon’s newly arrived original imprints) are mini-temples of plush carpeting and café tables where agents and writers and publicists huddle together, murmuring.

I had to resist the siren song of “Modernist Cuisine”—the obsessive scripture of molecular gastronomy by the millionaire savant Nathan Myhrvold, who had his very own booth—to get to the awards ceremony for PEN’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction, established by the novelist Barbara Kingsolver to promote “fiction that addresses issues of social justice.” The twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize has been given out since 2000 to a début novelist, and the money comes with a book deal from the indie publisher Algonquin press. I arrived to the Uptown Stage a little breathless, in time to see Kingsolver—tall, with a band of white hair framing a black bob, wearing chunky jewelry—present the award for “Good Kings, Bad Kings” to Susan Nussbaum, who sat on the stage in a wheelchair.

The novel, Kingsolver said, is a comedy, even though it takes up the bleak subject of severely disabled teen-agers who are being abused in the facility that’s supposed to be caring for them. “Every time I tried to put it down, the characters poked and prodded me. They are so belligerent, so endearing, so adorable,” Kingsolver said. Nussbaum herself was feisty and outspoken, talking about the pressures she experienced as a disabled writer. After years of writing plays starring disabled characters that no one would produce, she decided to turn to novel-writing and read all the books she could think of that took up the subject of disability. “Several options were available to me,” she said. She encountered characters who “heal quickly, who symbolize an abstract concept, or commit suicide. I found it infuriating that this was the image available to me. So I thought I would write this book with authentically disabled people who were not symbolic of anything, not considering suiciding any time soon.” The book will come out sometime next year.

Noon: Kristi Yamaguchi

Falling in step behind two young woman dressed all in white, wearing angel’s wings and handing out flyers (for what, I’ll never know), I breezed through the book labyrinth. I wanted to catch a glimpse of Kristi Yamaguchi, the figure-skater turned writer, who was to have “an intimate conversation” about her children’s book, “Dream Big, Little Pig,” with the editor Jennifer Brown. On my way, I passed by the crimson-walled mini-city comprising the booths devoted to “Read Russia,” where a presentation on the Yale University Press Stalin Digital Archive, an online library of declassified documents from Russia’s State archives, was taking place. A drifting snippet (from Jonathan Brent, who used to head Yale UP and is now the director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research): “….this project that we initiated in Moscow was so terribly opposed in the U.S. because it gives us an intimate understanding of the McCarthy period, and opened up material that the U.S. has kept secret since 1943… Has it had an impact? That will take time.” Russian speakers were gathered in clumps, talking intensely. I’d have to come back here later.

Kristi, resplendent in a magenta silk top, retained the sheen of television. The audience was sparse. She tittered nervously after delivering, a little too emphatically, lines like “Athletes are used to being coached and told what to do, and that helps in all areas of life, including being an author,” and looked a little wounded when no one reacted with applause. Not wanting to dent the Kristi of my imagination, I decided it was time for some science fiction.

12:30 P.M.: Sci-Fi Time

Back at the Uptown stage, Jeff VanderMeer, the co-editor (with Ann VanderMeer) of the just-published “The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories” was talking about how they went about compiling the new anthology. Prior compilations taking up literature of the strange had included writers from the U.S. and the U.K., but “in ‘The Weird’ we wanted to show, yeah, there’s this stuff, but there’s also so much other amazing stuff, from Japan, from Nigeria, from all over the place. In the period from 1910 to about 1930, people all over the world were thinking about the same things.” Walter Mosley, an elder of mystery novels who was dressed like a beatnik in a black leather jacket and cap, reflecting on the capacious world of contemporary genre fiction, remembered his early rejections from publishers. “They told me, ‘White people don’t read about black people, black women don’t like black men, and black men don’t read, so who is going to buy this book?’&#160” Sorting books into rigid categories, said another panelist, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America John Scalzi, is “neither how it’s always been, nor how it should be.” Mosley: “ ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’—it’s a great fantasy novel, but also a great work of literature.”

1 P.M.: Y.A. Fanladies

I wandered over the autograph-signing area, a giant stage filled with writers seated at tables. Before them were fans, corralled into lines by metal barricades. I talked to one young woman, waiting in a long line of other young women. She was here to meet Lisa Mangum, a writer of the much beloved Y.A. mystery series “The Hourglass Door.” Denizens of an even longer all-female line, whose average age seemed to be about forty, had their books at the ready for Shannon Hale, the Mormon author of the fantasy novels “Princess Academy” and “Goosegirl.” I asked a woman who works for the Scholastic book clubs what she likes about Hale’s books. “She takes fairy tales and makes them human.” I asked another why she likes to read books that were written with teen-agers in mind. She told me that it was because you experience your emotions most powerfully when you’re a teen-ager, and these books transport her to that state of outsized feeling.

1:30 P.M.: The Russians

While Mosley and VanderMeer and Susan Nussbaum argued for a more diverse, inclusive American literature, the Russians, on a panel about literature and civil society, wished for a more élitist literary culture. “We are now living in a karaoke culture: nobody wants to listen, everyone wants to sing” intoned the stockily handsome novelist Zakhar Prilepin in Russian (he was simultaneously translated). “Nobody asks themselves if they sing well because they find the sound of their own voice pleasant… I sometimes wish we could return to the Middle Ages, when you had to get permission from a master practitioner before you could practice an occupation.”

Mikhal Afanasyer, a librarian, spoke about whether the worship of Russian writers as cultural and political prophets has persisted. “Readers do indeed look to writers as advisors on all matters. But I would like to sketch a less optimistic view. It is true that for two centuries in Russia, writers were people to whom people paid attention, and that has continued by a kind of inertia. But the fundamental difference was that people used to read the work of writers, and sought the answers in their work. The image of the writer has been separated from the text. The writer is a symbol, a brand.”

Prilepin spoke again, responding to a question from the audience about whether writers have lost their readers because censorship has declined—perhaps because now anyone can say anything, there’s an idea that you don’t need a brave author to say it. “It’s a very dangerous illusion for a society to think that any person is capable of framing a problem. So for that reason writers in Russia were the front rank of an intellectual class. They not only stated problems but formulated them correctly. Knowing who your adversary is is half the battle.”

2 P.M.: N.Y.R.B. e-Lit

I happened on the N.Y.R.B. Classics booth—home to resurrected classics from all over the world, chosen by the judicious editor Edwin Frank and then reprinted in the N.Y.R.B.’s sleekly designed paperback editions, with new introductions by noted writers. (I’ve discovered some of my favorite books through the series—Andrei Platonov’s “Soul” and Dezső Kosztolányi’s “Skylark,” to name two.) I spotted a galley with a double-bill reprint of two Kingsley Amis novels—“The Old Devils” and “Lucky Jim,” with introductions by John Banville and Keith Gessen. I also discovered that, starting this fall, N.Y.R.B. is launching a new e-book-only imprint, made up of literary novels and books in translation singled out by the writer Sue Halpern. “Our logic is very simple,” Halpern writes. “Since, as the argument goes, it is too risky and expensive to bring out these sorts of books, we will take advantage of digital’s lower costs to expand the reading universe.” The first three offerings will be Lindsay Clarke’s “The Water Theatre” (September); Zena el Khalil’s “Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir” (October), and Yoram Kaniuk’s “1948” (November). The project is one answer to the lament about print’s demise; think of what’s now possible in the cheaper e-book form.

Thus reassured, I decided to call it quits for the day. A group of blustery Canadians nearly disrupted my equilibrium—they greeted me and a companion in the Bookforum booth in Italian, mistaking us for members of the Italian Trade Commission and wanting to strike a deal with us for a book about strategies for self-employment that they were convinced would be a best-seller in Europe (Bookforums summer cover must explain the mistake, of which we disabused them). I went back downstairs, and plunged into the spring air to begin the walk back to Times Square, where my desk, covered in books, awaited.

Photograph courtesy of BookExpo America.

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Sasha Weiss was the literary editor of newyorker.com from 2012 to 2014.

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