The Rise of Virtual Foreign Author Tours By Ed Nawotka | May 07, 2021
One of the unintended consequences of the pandemic and the shift to virtual author events is that booksellers and publishers have had the opportunity to put together events for overseas authors who would not usually tour the U.S. “The possibilities are endless,” said Pierce Alquist, director of the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Mass. “The pairings and creative panels we have done are once-in-a-lifetime events.” She cited a virtual event in February during which Russian author Maria Stepanova discussed her book
In Memory of Memory (New Directions): Alquist, who ran the event, was in Boston; Stepanova was in Moscow; her translator, Sasha Dugdale, was in the U.K.; and the moderator, Elif Batuman, was in Brooklyn. In another far-flung example, for an Earth Day event in April, Point Reyes Bookstore in Point Reyes, Calif., hosted a talk with Ice