How to Save a Book Festival

How to Save a Book Festival

“It’s like you’re sitting in a bar, and there are all of these fights going on all around you,” the novelist Ann Patchett is telling me. “You look over, and you think, ‘Not my fight.’ And you look down the bar, and you think, ‘Not my fight either.’ And then someone comes into the bar, and this horrible fight ensues, and you think, ‘Oh, God, that’s my fight.’” Ms. Patchett is not sitting in a bar when she tells me this story. She’s sitting in her…