In this photo taken Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009, Mitchell Kaplan, co-founder of Miami Book Fair... 
(Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo)
Poetry and music have been cut and there will be no parade to kick off the Miami Book Fair International as in years past. But one of the nation's leading literary festivals isn't giving up on readers in a bad economy.
The fair that began in 1984 just won't quit: Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to throng the tented stalls of downtown Miami for the 2009 fair, which opens Sunday and runs through Nov. 15. And once again, organizers have amassed a list of acclaimed writers to give readings — Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk among them.
Never mind that this book fair has had to make do with cutbacks and state and county funding. Last year's budget was about $1.7 million and this year that was cut by $400,000.
"Our budget was severely affected," book fair director Alina Interian said. "The situation is difficult all around, as we all know. We are all feeling it one way or another."
Put on by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College, the fair is more compact this year, shedding its international section and some other components.
This year the number of authors coming to the fair has also been reduced, from 450 to 350. And the majority of the authors will attend with financial support from their publishers, not fair organizers as in years past.
Still, the writers will come and fair organizers are hoping that so will the audiences.
Atwood, whose latest novel is "The Year of the Flood," said that people are still reading a lot of books. Never mind the advent of Twitter and other forms of social networking that she likens to shorthand.
"The question is what are they reading and how are those things they are reading being produced, distributed and being acquired," she said.
Kingsolver said "literature will never die" and stories will always be needed in any age.
"The way we tell them and the way we listen to them may change form through the ages, but the need is always there," said Kingsolver, whose latest book is "The Lacuna."
