Bernice McFadden reads GATHERING OF WATERS

Bernice McFadden reads chapter one of GATHERING OF WATERS:

GO THE F**K TO SLEEP for the holidays

GO THE F*** TO SLEEP rages into the Holiday Season,
with more than 500,000 copies shipped!

Tuesday, December 6, Brooklyn, NY: The satirical “bedtime books for parents” that became a viral Internet sensation and instant national best seller upon its publication in mid-June is quickly proving to one of the most popular holiday gifts of 2011. In the words of Julie Schaper, President of Consortium (the Perseus-owned company that distributes the book), “Go the F*** to Sleep is the gift book that keeps on giving!” The holiday season highlights for the book include:

--Brooklyn-based independent publisher Akashic Books has just rushed out an 8th and 9th printing, bringing the total number of books in print up to 600,000, with over 500,000 of them already shipped to stores.

--Time Magazine will feature the book as one of the “best things of the year” in their “Person of the Year” issue of December 14.

--6 months and running on the New York Times Best Seller List. The book will be at the #2 spot on December 11.

--Winner of a Giftee Award, sponsored by Gifts.com, Parents Magazine, and the Huffington Post.

--“Best of 2011” lists: Amazon.com, Goodreads, GQ Magazine, etc.

--Film rights sold to Fox 2000 Films, and author Adam Mansbach has sold a family sitcom to CBS based loosely on his experiences with Go the F*** to Sleep.

--The book has been sold into translation into more than 30 languages and counting. Already published and landed on best-seller lists in Canada, England, Germany, Australia.

--Growing list of celebrity readers of the book: Samuel Jackson, Werner Herzog, Jenna Elfman, Alec Baldwin (forthcoming), Judah Friedlander, Noni Hazelhurst.

Go the F*** to Sleep by Adam Mansbach; with illustrations by Ricardo Cortés
Published by Akashic Books, Brooklyn
Distributed by Consortium/Perseus
#1 Best Seller: New York Times, Amazon.com, Wall Street Journal,
Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Times, etc.

The Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize

The Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize

The Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival is pleased to announce the establishment of the “Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize” for non-fiction narrative short story or essay.

The Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival is pleased to announce the establishment of the “Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize” for non-fiction narrative short story or essay.

The Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize, a cash award of $400, will be awarded to the best Brooklyn-focused non-fiction essay or short story which is set in Brooklyn and is about Brooklyn and/or Brooklyn people/characters. We are seeking compelling Brooklyn stories from writers with a broad range of backgrounds and ages who can render Brooklyn's rich soul and intangible qualities through the writer's actual experiences in Brooklyn.

Submissions should be between 4 to 10 pages. (Up to 2500 words). Send your Brooklyn Non-Fiction story as a Word document by email to: Brooklynfa@yahoo.com

From the collection of selected Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize submissions, five authors will be selected to read from their work and discuss their Brooklyn stories with the audience at our December 16th, 2011, Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival “Brooklyn Non-Fiction program at St. Francis College held in partnership with the St. Francis College Humanities Department.

These stories and several other submitted stories will be published on the Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival website and made available to the public.

Submission Deadline – November 30th, 2011.

Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival is dedicated to presenting cultural programs about Brooklyn that illuminate the rich history and unique character of Brooklyn’s vibrant past and illuminating Brooklyn happening today.

CONTACT:
Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival
Email: brooklynfa@yahoo.com
Website: www.FilmBrooklyn.org

Miami Book Fair International

Akashic Books is gearing up for Miami Book Fair International!
See below for the list of our authors' programs!

All events will take place at Miami Dade College
300 NE Second Ave., Miami, FL 33132


--Fri., Nov. 18, 6:00pm--
Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes, author and illustrator of Go the Fuck to Sleep, will appear with comedienne Jenna Elfman and singer Nikka Costa
Chapman Conference Center (Building 3, Room 3210)


--Sat., Nov. 19, 11:00am--
Elizabeth Nunez, author of Boundaries will appear with Francisco Goldman (Say Her Name), Hector Tobar (The Barbarian Nurseries) and Esmeralda Santiago (Conquistadora)
Auditorium (Building 1, Room 1261)


--Sat., Nov. 19, 12:30pm--
New Jersey Noir contributors Robert Pinsky, Gerald Stern, and S.J. Rozan will appear on a panel moderated by Les Standiford
Pavilion (N.E. 3rd Street and 1st Avenue)


--Sat., Nov. 19, 2:30pm--
Nathan Larson, author of The Dewey Decimal System, will appear with Jason Skipper (Hustle) and Yan Lianke (Dream of Ding Village)
Building 7, Room 7128


--Sat., Nov. 19, 3:30pm--
Kola Boof, author of The Sexy Part of the Bible, will appear with authors Carine Fabius, Jiang Bing, and Hong Ying
Building 7, Room 7128


--Sat., Nov. 19, 3:30pm--
Sterling Watson, author of Fighting in the Shade, will appear with Diana Abu-Jaber (Birds of Paradise), Karen Russell (Swamplandia!) and Elizbeth Stuckey-French (The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady)
Auditorium (Building 1, Room 1261)


--Sat., Nov. 19, 5:00pm--
Mr. Fish, author of Go Fish, will present his book
Prometeo Theatre (Building 1, Room 1101)


--Sun., Nov. 20, 1:30om--
Nelson George, author of The Plot Against Hip Hop, will appear with Tom Franklin (Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter), and Bradford Morrow (The Diviner's Tale)
Auditorium (Building 1, Room 1261)


--Sun., Nov. 20, 3:30pm--
Randall Robinson, author of Makeda, will appear with author Deborah Willis, to discuss African-American images from the 1890s to present
Building 7, Room 7106-07

Déséquilibres Synthétiques, by Lydia Lunch

Book trailer for the French edition
of Will Work For Drugs by Lydia Lunch!
(Directed by Elise Psvt)

WILL WORK FOR DRUGS/Lydia Lunch/ Book Trailer from TanKMutaTion on Vimeo.

Sneak Peek: CURSE THE NAMES by Robert Arellano

Akashic Books is proud to present an excerpt from Curse the Names,
by Robert Arellano, forthcoming in January 2012.

Curse the Names is available for pre-order
exclusively on AkashicBooks.com!

(click to enlarge images)

PLEASE TAKE ME OFF THE GUEST LIST eBook available now!

Please Take Me Off the Guest List is now available in eBook
format, for only $5.99, from iTunes, Amazon.com, B&N, etc!

Please see below to read a new essay by Zachary Lipez
written exclusively for the Akashic Books blog.

It’s a disappointing time to be alive if only because we’re all going to die. Whenever I feel inclined to be disappointed in the Obama presidency or the rapidity of the freezer burn on my ice cream, I ask myself, “Is this as disappointing as my inevitable death? As the death of my loved ones?” I throw in the “loved ones” part as a concession to the possibility of a nosy god; in reality my loved ones are a distant second in my terrified concern. Maybe even a close third to Christopher Hitchens. The thought of that guy alone, shirtless in front of his mirror on a sunny Thursday afternoon, probably staring for hours as the ice in his gimlet melts, fills me with an existential sorrow that my entire extended family in a cliff-bound Greyhound just can’t match. Sorry, Mom. I’ll visit soon. Please make that peanut dip I love so much.

So what to do when death looms on the mind and with it the promise of the richly deserved perdition of unbaptised babies and privileged layabouts? Why, we look to the future. Just like our daddies did when they weren’t avoiding the draft, fetishizing album art, and laying the fetid groundwork for Graydon Carter’s career. Our daddies were smart, in their fashion, and we wouldn’t have all these ones and zeros without them. So thanks, parents, all your weird racist bullshit was totally worth it ‘cuz now we have computo-books. Or whatever they’re called.

Please Take Me Off the Guest List, the collaborative book that I did with Stacy Wakefield and Nick Zinner is now a computo-book. It glows, it flickers, in a hundred years it will have your job, puny human. Stacy made Nick’s photos pop and the text wiz; the design has retained its clever (and not that awful new kind of clever but the original kind—the kind that built the labyrinth) charm.

The computo- book is priced for the Endless Recession. You can even pay in Euros if you’re Beyonce.

Oh yeah, the iTunes version includes three songs that were initially just on a limited edition 7” that one could purchase with the physical, three dimensional, real world book. The record was also in all three dimensions. The songs are in, like, five, man. They were written and performed in one day in one basement in one upstate New York. The people who wrote and performed them are not important. It’s the songs that matter, again, man.

To make this blog post worth your valuable time, I’ve included an illustration by Nate Turbow. He is a character in one of the stories in Please Take Me Off the Guest List. His general spirit pervades it. His illustration should not be taken as his specific reaction to reading the book but a more universal sense of dismay that, god willing, you will all feel when feeling its warm digital light upon you. Or, embracing the newness, parlance, and crudity of these awful, awful times, “up in you.”

Please Take Me Off the Guest List—now built for end times and priced for the decline. Enjoy!

Text by Zachary Lipez; illustration by Nate Turbow (http://www.nateturbow.com/)