Scott Thomas Anderson April 30, 2021Updated: April 30, 2021, 2:59 pm An audience member questions a speaker during the 2018 Bay Area Book Festival. Photo: Lorenzo Fernandez / Kopec Photographer 2018 When the Bay Area Book Festival goes virtual again this year, it will do so in the wake of an isolating period that showed just how much books bring imaginative relief, build empathetic bonds and offer a communal bridge back to one another. Some of its events are to set focus on those very lessons, with award-winning authors examining how storytelling helped Americans escape 2020’s gloom and anxiety, or travel oceans away from the rooms that they were worried about stepping out of.