Who needs San Francisco? Litquake is coming to Brooklyn!

If you know friends in San Francisco, you’ve heard them go on and on about the things we don’t have here: the burritos, the hills, the fact that EVERYDAY IS 4/20 ALL THE TIME, and this book-nerd nirvana event called Litquake. Tell your SF friends to go back to cramming their face with Faralito because Litquake is coming to Brooklyn for the first time ever in May!

Litquake’s Lit Crawl is a huge, free literature-centric bar crawl that will debut in Brooklyn in the Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill area. It features more than 30 authors at 10 venues including BookCourt and a yarn shop. The writers involved include Amy Sohn (Prospect Park West) and Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Time); and events include an old tyme radio show and a cabaret act. The event has traveled to Manhattan for four years now, so what took them so long to finally come over to the county of Kings? The answer — and more event details — from the organizers below. 

The crawl is on May 19, which means the showdown between Brooklyn’s literary crowd and the foodie/music crowd that will go to The Great Googamooga the same day is finally upon us. Litquake spokesman Liam Passmore says they have been trying to come to Brooklyn for a few years now but kept getting tripped up by logistics.

“This year we took the proverbial matter into our own hands and did the organizing and programming ourselves by bringing in and curating the various organizations, securing venues and then letting them produce their events,” he said. “It helps too that a long time committee member, Suzanne Russo, who moved to New York is now living in Brooklyn and wanted to work as our agent there in order to make this happen from 2,500 miles away.”

The event did make one foray into Brooklyn before, at its very first NYC event back in 2008, when the last phase of the crawl required people to hop the train to Williamsburg, which didn’t go over so well with participants. When planning a Brooklyn specific event, Passmore said it was “daunting to choose a ‘literary neighborhood,’ since there are so many” (that’s what’s up). Russo ended up choosing the Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill area because it was aligned with a bookstore, and bars along Court and Smith streets were keen on the idea immediately.

“It just had that lively, community vibe that describes the crawl,” Russo said.

The SF Lit Crawl goes on for many blocks, and each of the 85 venues is reportedly packed wall-to-wall. So, what say you, Brooklyn? Can we rock this shit?

Lit Crawl Brooklyn begins at 6pm May 19, with a bunch of events involved. See more info about the schedule, authors and literary publications involved and other details here.