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Last year, 50,000 New Yorkers voted, and an even higher turnout is expected this year.
But first, heres some helpful background on each writer and book.
His book isIf Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin.
She finds her life intertwined with that of a gangster, Dexter Styles.
Esmeralda Santiago is the author of both of memoirs and novels.
Jennifer Finney Boylan: Lets begin with a line from Imbolos novel: Maybe Im becoming another person.
To live in the city is to be aware of the way New York alters who we are.
Is that a redundancy?
A damaged writer?Kunzru:I neednt have even specified.
You dont have a conversation with people in public space in London unless youre actually insane.
Why the East Village?
I took it sight unseen, and it was great.
Has that changed the way you write?Kunzru:Completely.
I said, could I have a Coney Island just, and they said, Its a Tiny Island?
What is Tiny Island?
And the other is a sort of suburban New Jersey boy, and theyre record producers.
And they have this supposed love for everything that is old, everything that has the patina of age.
Making new things feel old.
The motor for this plot is their faking of a 1920s blues record.
And instead, they may have channeled something from that is trying to make itself present.
They fall into this vortex, this meta-vortex.
So theyre not who they were in the beginning.Kunzru:No.
He sometimes is walking down the street, and its now.
So he has these glimpses of previous version of the city.
Imbolo, Id like to ask you the same question.
Who were you when you came to New York City?
I was in my mid-20s.
I moved to Harlem.
Im happy I stayed, but I thought about leaving.
I thought New York was special, but too expensive, which is no news.
The city did change me.
I became, I dont know, a tougher person.
It was just a place I had to be tough.
And I did not.
That influenced my book a lot.
Is there sadness in it as well?Mbue:No.
Its not a good thing.
Which, Im sure, you’ve got the option to relate.
That is what happened to Neni.
And I could relate to that myself.
Jenny, you came to New York City from Chicago.
What was it you were seeking?
Then I came to New York.
So I got here, I had been …
I really kind of believed that it was just amazing.
I hadnt actually read it over very carefully.
It looked great, as all manuscripts do.
So I came here with a lot of …
I just had no idea what I was doing.
I worked as a temp, which I thought would be incredibly lucrative.
I couldnt believe how high the hourly wage was.
But I also didnt understand how expensive New York was.
So it would all just kind of flow.
This is not good.
So I learned that the book was unreadable.
I learned that temping …
But I think the answer is that I just adore New York.
Your novelManhattan Beachis about the very profound changes that happened in New York City during those war years.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
The recognition of how abruptly a city can feel like a war zone.
I mean, I just think thats something very few Americans understand.
We just dont have a lot of collective memory of that.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard was the largest builder and repairer of allied ships in the world.
The one Im thinking of is women had opportunities that they hadnt had before.
They were in their 80s then.
And many of them, of course, have passed away since.
There was one woman named Ida, who was a welder, and she clearly had loved welding.
She talked about it kind of sensually, even at 80-something.
But the women protested.
And Ida was very small.
I wanna keep welding.
Those were the kinds of ways that the city changed.
Esmeralda, I suspect that youre not the same person you were, when you were 13.
We had no electricity, no running water.
And thats what I thought I would be the rest of my life.
I now realize that my brothers accident was the precipitating factor.
And Im like, No.
And she said, Well, you know, people like us are Hispanics here in the United States.
And indeed that was the big question for me for years after that.
Who was that girl?
Who am I now?
Who do I want to be?
And how do I create the person I want to be.
And when I arrive in New York, the expectations are completely different.
And I had to kind of figure out, whose expectations do I follow?
My mothers expectations, which are very specific to the culture?
I had to figure out which one of these expectations do I accept for myself.
How do I create the person I want to be, given that almost all the expectations are negative?
I had to become a new person.
I could barely really recognize it.
As soon as my children were old enough, they all moved back to Brooklyn.
Is that also a banished place?
Are there ghosts of it still here?Barry Jenkins:Idont know if its a banished place.
Tarell has spent a lot of his life in New York, Miami, and London.
One of the main characters, Fonny, is trying to find a loft.
You know, theres literally a line that says theyve got lofts standing empty all over the East Side.
They have $5 million lofts that arenotempty all over the East Side.
He was like, Oh, you made this New York.
Its not a New York of places.
Its a New York of faces.
Beale Streethas these tensions in it.
Its a very dark book.
But theres also, I think, tremendous optimism.
Fonny and Tish believe in their child.
They believe in love, so its a very romantic book.
Or do you think its still around?Jenkins:Theres a duality in the book.
And thats in the emotional undertaking of the characters.
But also, thing two, in the vocation.
He wants to make a world of two things: of his wife, and his vocation.
I thought that maybe we could talk about the issue of imagination and research.
The most unusual thing I did was I developed a habit of recording my walks around the city.
Ive got these little microphones that fit into your ear like earbuds, and theyre little microphones.
And I would go walking around downtown, and then listen to my walks.
Were normally dominated by our visual sense, and thats how we navigate the world.
You dont realize necessarily that there are birds in the tree above you on a busy downtown street.
Or that youre passing bits and pieces of peoples conversation.
Jenny, you were saying youre an eavesdropper.
Egan:I want those ear mics.
Kunzru:Theyre very good because you might pick up from quite a long way away.
The moral hazard is considerable.
Whats your favorite sound of New York?Kunzru:I like Washington Square.
I like all the different phases of walking into Washington Square.
Also, actually, zigzagging either side of Canal.
There are all sorts of different tiny micro spaces around there.
It changes from one minute to another.
Imbolo,Behold the Dreamersis set during the financial crisis of 2008.
Did you go back and research that whole era?
The fall of Lehman Brothers, and that whole era of economic collapse?
I tried to get a job at Goldman Sachs.
I couldnt get a job there, so maybe it was some sort of revenge on Wall Street.
But my novel is also about immigrants from my hometown.
From Limbe, Cameroon.
That one was not as hard, because I know what theyre lives are like.
I came to America from that same town.
I lived in Harlem, like them.
I live in a very bigoted world also.
I was writing about people whose lives are nothing like mine.
I remember what it was like the first time I went to Park Avenue.
Id never seen wealth like that in my life.
So that fascination, I think, is what really drove me.
This fascination with theUber-wealthy.
Before I came to New York City, I had been living in New Jersey.
And when I went to Columbia was the first time that I met rich people.
American rich people, that level of wealth and that life.
So when I went to the Upper East Side, I was following them around.
Looking at their Louis Vuitton handbags.
What they wear, and how they talk.
I didnt know any chauffeurs, I didnt interview any chauffeurs.
It was a long journey for me to really come to relate to them.
I grew up worshiping at the altar of James Baldwin.
And this is the first time that any Baldwin piece will be adapted in the English language.
So its a lot.
Not to put any more responsibility on myself, but it was a lot.
Because the book is nonlinear.
Its very point of view.
Youre in Tishs head for a lot of his novel.
Film is not the best artistic vehicle for interiority.
Baldwins stock in trade is the interior lives of his characters.
So it was actually a great challenge.
Fonny is working on the wood.
Its a very soft wood.
He doesnt want to defile the wood.
And I was like, I need to visually translate that.
You just hear this rumble.
Jenny,Manhattan Beachfeels like an incredibly well-researched book.
But what I do use are my memories of times and places.
Its very archetypal, with the spherical helmet.
Its a very heavy outfit.
Its not really an outfit, its almost like a machine that is assembled around you.
It weighs 200 pounds.
So it was extremely uncomfortable to wear it, and I stood up very briefly.
Luckily, someone had a camera for that millisecond that I was on my feet.
Years later, I started writing about diving, and I could write about how uncomfortable that dress was.
Esmeralda,When I Was Puerto Ricanwas published in 1993, decades after you came to America.
So my first draft was something like 1,000 pages.
I was a teenager.
What was the most famous song in 1968?
I remembered the music, but I didnt have it specific to that summer, lets say.
And when was that on the radio all the time?
And so I just kind of fact-checked a lot of my memories.
We had the same mother, but we all had a different mother.
Theres real suffering thats going on in Puerto Rico, and our governments neglect is making the suffering worse.
No access to power.
I knew how to build a fire so that we could cook.
Theres at least two whole generations who didnt know how to do that.
Its all very emotional.
Im shaking myself talking about it.
Theyve had to abandon their home.
I was taken from Puerto Rico as a child.
I had no choice.
Audience member: This question is for Jennifer Egan.
I published my first novel in 1995, so Ive been publishing for a while.
Ive been in New York and sort of observing the literary scene, to some degree.
And I actually feel that things really are changing in that way.
Like something is actually different.
And I feel that that is the best thing for all of us.
Jenkins:I dont think its a fluke in the sense that theres about to be a new Census.
You know, more people voted for the other candidate.
So its not the America we actually live in.
Like, if I say, Oh,Moonlightwon Best Picture.
So, I think thats one thing, but nah, its not a fluke.
I dont think so.
But its the way we box things.
Its really easy to allow things to boxed into a certain way, and then another way.
Audience member: This is for Imbolo.
Oh, Africans can write?
I mean to me, as a child, the classics were, you know,Cry Beloved Country.
Id never heard of Tolstoy.
But I also think its important that we dont put all Africans in one basket.
I mean it is a very different experience.
Theres a scene in my novel where I address what happens when people find out Im from Cameroon.
Oh my God, I know somebody who went to Uganda!
Another person says, When an American says that, you should tell them, Oh.
I have an uncle in Toronto.
That way they can understand that.
It is very different experiences.
I mean, Ill say that Im Cameroonian, which is what I am.
