I have to be careful what I say. Edwidge Dandicat may be reading this.

The author of Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory was a highlight of the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, which draws thousands of book fans to Borough Hall and its plaza on a Sunday each September.

Dandicat talked a little bit about how the internet affects the writing life.It used to be that your editor would send you a stack of reviews, she said. And if the editor was nice, the negative ones would be left out. Now things are different.

“Now if even a child in Budapest writes about you in your blog, somebody forwards it to you,” she said.

So presumably, she’ll be getting this post. (Heck, if she’s getting posts from some kid in Hungary, it’s almost embarrassing if she doesn’t see this one.)

The book festival is a feast for serious readers. There I saw Pete Hamill read a pretty stirring scene from his book Snow in August, and sat in on discussions about hoaxes and cons and how Facebook, Twitter and other incarnations of new media are changing the writing world. (That was separate from the Dandicat talk, but it’s a theme that’s hard to get away from.)

I also picked up a book from a line of re-issued pulp novels written by women.

Dandicat talked about her life. When she came to Brooklyn from Haiti at age 12, all she had to show her what it was like here was a photo of her uncle in a large coat, leaning on a car covered with snow. She remembered flying over New York City, seeing all the lights and thinking she would be so busy here, she’d never have time to write to anyone.

At that time, AIDS was a fairly new fear — and Hatians were pegged as one group among which the disease was rampant. Dandicat recalled Hatian students being beating up, called “AIDS people,” or “boat people.”

“It wasn’t a fun time to go to school,” she said.

Appearing before a crowd that filled the auditorium at St. Francis College, which holds about 350, she read from a section called “Transitions” from her 2007 memoir, Brother, I’m Dying. It relates the late phase of her pregnancy with her daughter, and how she came to realize that her daughter would be gradually separating from her for the rest of her life.

The scene Hamill read was about an immigrant rabbi and an 11-year-old non-Jewish boy who has befriended him, both going to Ebbets Field to see Jackie Robinson play, and marveling at the vast diversity of the fans coming together to watch baseball.

Not everything was great, of course. Hamill shared the stage with two other writers — Jacqueline Bishop, who read poems about a love affair from a collection called Snapshots from Istanbul, and some guy I don’t want to mention because I thought was kind of boring.

Listening to the talk “Literature in the Digital Age” was a bit depressing, raising the question: Will people continue to read words on a page, when there are Web pages to surf, and interactive activities like Facebook and Twitter.

“Isn’t a good story enough?” asked John Freeman, acting editor of Granta, at one point.

It wasn’t certain that the answer to that question would be “yes.” But Dwight Gardner, the New York Times book critic pointed to a study by the National Endowment for the Arts showing that literary reading has climbed about 4 percentage points in recent years.

(I’ll look more at that study in a subsequent post.)

As for those bells and whistles, Gardner said, “I fear that those things may push away as many readers as they pull in.”

The talks are not the only reason to hit the book fest. You can find all kinds of books from small publishing houses. I picked up “The Blackbirder,” a re-issued 1943 noir novel written by Dorothy B. Hughes, a crime writer in the 1940s and 1950s.

Yes, were women writing pulp and noir fiction in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

I admit, I didn’t know. Now I do.

And that’s why I go to the book festival every year.

So, Edwidge, how’d I do?