Monday, December 20, 2010
Sneak Peek: THE MECHANICS OF HOMOSEXUAL INTERCOURSE by Lonely Christopher
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
HOLIDAY BOOK SALE
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Sneak Peek: COWS, by Matthew Stokoe
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Sneak Peek: 100 POSTERS, 134 SQUIRRELS
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Akashic Books at the Miami Book Fair
--Fri., Nov. 19, 3:00pm
Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus
300 N.E. Second Ave.
*writing workshop featuring Christina Garcia, registration required, please see here for details
--Sat., Nov. 20, 12:00pm
Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus, Room 3410
300 N.E. Second Ave.
*featuring William Heffernan with authors Michael Koryta and Marin Solares
--Sun., Nov. 21, 10:00am
Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus, Prometeo
300 N.E. Second Ave.
*featuring Preston L Allen with authors T Cooper and Vicki Hendricks
--Sun., Nov. 21, 12:00pm
Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus, Pavilion A
300 N.E. Second Ave.
*featuring Edwidge Danticat with Haiti Noir contributors M.J. Fiervre and Mark Kurlansky, Josaphat-Robert Large, Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, and Les Standiford, editor of Miami Noir
--Sun., Nov. 21, 12:30pm
Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus, Room 3208-09
300 N.E. Second Ave.
*featuring Bernice L McFadden with authors Glenn Taylor and Michael Knight
--Sun., Nov. 21, 4:00 pm
Miami Dade College, Auditorium
300 N.E. Second Ave.
*featuring Nick Zinner (of the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Stacy Wakefield, and Zachary Lipez; they will perform, present a slide show and read from Please Take Me Off the Guest List
Please visit the Miami Book Fair website for complete details.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Sneak Peek: FROM A BASEMENT IN SEATTLE, The Poster Art of Brad Klausen
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
NoirCon 2010
Fri., Nov. 5 at Society Hill Playhouse, 507 South 8th St.
PHILADELPHIA, PA
-- 10:15 - 11:15am: Philadelphia Noir editor Carlin Romano, with contributors Keith Gilman, Duane Swierczynski, Meredith Anthony, Dennis Tafoya, and Jim Zervanos
-- 12:30–1:45pm: IACW Luncheon honoring William Heffernan, author of Dead Detective
-- 4:30–5:30pm: Writers on Noir panel discussion with William Heffernan, Reed Farrel Coleman, Cameron Ashley, Lorenzo Carcattera, Vicki Hendricks, and Daniel Woodrell
...and our very own Johnny Temple will receive the Jay and Deen Kogan award for Excellence in Publishing!
Click here for more information.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
ELVIS AVENGED in MESOPOTAMIA by ARTHUR NERSESIAN
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Sneak Peek: PLEASE TAKE ME OFF THE GUEST LIST
Friday, August 20, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
NO SPACE FOR FURTHER BURIALS, by Feryal Ali Gauhar
Thursday, May 6, 2010
BLACK MUSIC by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
Black Music compiles the writing of Amiri Baraka (as LeRoi Jones) covering the burgeoning free jazz scene between 1959-1967 in publications such as Down Beat and Kulchur. Originally published in 1968, this AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series reissue includes a new introduction and recent interview with Amiri Baraka. The book is a landmark corpus of jazz writing, following the careers of innovators John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun-Ra, Archie Shepp, Sonny Murray, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, Bobby Bradford, Milford Graves, and many others.
What is most striking about this collection is Baraka's locating of aesthetic innovations in jazz forms—the "harmolodic" orchestration of Coleman, the chord-painting of Coltrane, the New Orleans second-line overblowing of Ayler—within the political economy of black music, its tension with the commercial world, and the rich lineage of struggle and human experience in Black America. The performances chronicled in the book, the record reviews, and interviews reflect the free jazz commitment to total freedom on both the social and artistic fronts. Baraka's style avoids the esoteric or purely academic critical approach that was very popular among (predominantly European) critics of the avant-garde in the 1960s:
"Another hopeless flaw in a great deal of the writing about jazz that has been done over the years is that in most cases the writers, the jazz critics, have been anything but intellectuals (in the most complete sense of that word). Most jazz critics began as hobbyists or boyishly brash members of the American petit bourgeoisie, whose only claim to any understanding about the music was that they knew it was different; or else they had once been brave enough to make a trip into a Negro slum to hear their favorite instrumentalist defame Western musical tradition...The blues and jazz aesthetic, to be fully understood, must be seen in as nearly its complete human context as possible. People made bebop. The question the critic must ask is: why?"
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Akashic West Coast Book Tour: The REAL Story
I don’t know Mark Gluth (Glith? Glüth? Gloth? Rhymes with sloth? Got me), nor have I ever met him. He might be a really nice guy, for all I know, or he may be a serial killer. I’d say it’s an even bet either way. And I can’t read his inscrutable Calibri 11 point summary above (I have bad eyes), so I can’t really comment on its many inaccuracies. Although I did quickly scan the pictures to see if there were any of me. And there were! Thanks, Mork! Oh, wait... were you the guy with the really cool wife who can’t parallel park? Now I remember. Milk was the dude who kept going up to the podium after I was done and reading from some dead lady’s book. I’m like, “Can’t you write something of your own?” I think it was called The Late Work of Marge Simpson, which is doubly ridiculous, because Marge Simpson isn’t even dead. Get a TV, Murk. I must say, though, I was kind of stunned after security forced me to sit down and listen: Marge Simpson can write, people! I mean, her book was amazing. I admit I did not understand half of what I was hearing, because I’m stupid. But. Fantastic stuff, and not at all what I would expect coming from the brain of a cartoon.
This was in Los Angeles, at a place called Book Soup, which features nothing I could recognize as soup, and Moby. Dennis Cooper, the famous American smoker, was there, too. Man, the ego on that guy. ”I’m Dennis Fucking Cooper.” That’s practically all he said, ever. I thought I was through with rock star egos after Guided By Voices toured in Germany with Tocotronic, from Hamburg, who basically refused to speak English, or pretended they couldn’t, same thing. As you can imagine, the car ride to San Francisco was a real blast. “I’m Dennis Fucking Cooper. Where’s my gold-plated food?” “I’m Murk Goth. I stole Marge Simpson’s life work.” I put on my iPod, which I had found in the seat next to me at Book Soup, to drown out the chatter, only to find that the only music on it was Rush’s 2112, which I recently discovered has a lot of Ayn Rand references on it. She didn’t believe in God, so I hate her.
[Note to Akashic: please insert a picture of the banned Beatles cover with the chopped up baby parts here to illustrate my point. Thanks.]
Next stop: San Francisco. The Windy City. Home of the Blues.. Some guy with a clearly fake moustache calling himself “John Waters,” (like that’s a real name) would NOT stop talking to me. He asked if I owned two pairs of underwear, which is the only normal question I heard the entire book tour. We read at a place called City Lights, I guess named after that one Journey song, and I’d like to tell you how it went but “John Waters” slipped me a roofie and I blacked out until the next morning, when I woke up in the bathroom of a guy named Michael Karo, who was staring at me, which I found unnerving. Dennis Fucking Cooper bailed on us, mumbling something about being “allergic to Portland,” and I got violently carsick several times before we even left the city. By this time I was starting to really get into 2112. Who is John Galt, anyway? Seems like a decent kid.
[Note to Akashic: please insert a picture of John Galt here.]
So. Portland. Here’s what I remember about Portland: a lot of angry alcoholics and some kind of vegan tiramisu that tasted like twice-chewed cardboard. Other than that, we found ourselves in a mysterious city whose only residents seemed to be books. This is a picture of Portland that I took with my mind:
Exactly. Onwards to Seattle, which is situated near the Arctic Circle, as anyone with a third grade education (like me) knows. Oh, what times we had in Seattle! Not on this tour, but on previous visits. This time, no one would let me climb Mount Saint Helens, nor would they let me search the forests for Bigfoot, who is a personal friend and will likely take my failure to visit him as an insult and come to Los Angeles and eat me. Instead, we ended up in some weird cabaret space, like the one from the movie Cabaret except without Joel Grey (also a personal friend, and also inhumanly hungry, for obvious reasons). I had to read from my book, and then this Goth guy got up and stumbled over literally every word in not-his book in front of what I’m told was his entire family, who were much better looking than him so I’m not buying it.
[Note to Akashic: please insert a picture of some ridiculously good-looking people here to illustrate the difference between Merk and his so-called family.]
Afterwards we ended up in some kind of diner, or bar, or both, and as usual I ended up paying for everything because, well, everyone else left and I was stuck with the bill. Somehow I made it back to the Bates Motel, where I did not take a shower, because a) I’m not that stupid, and b) who takes showers?
Jeez Louise, who am I kidding? This was maybe the best book tour in the history of book tours, and if you missed it I feel really sorry for you in a fleeting way. Mark’s book The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis is much better than my book The Failure, although they are both worth paying any amount to purchase, and Dennis Cooper was a supernally gracious host and, as everyone knows, maybe the best living American writer. It was both an honor and a pleasure to spend time in his company. My thanks to Mark, his wife Erin, to everyone at Akashic who worked to make this happen. and of course to Dennis, and my apologies to anyone who I might have offended by my boorish book tour hijinks. I had every intention of behaving myself on our brief trip, but we all know the road to hell is paved with my behavior. I’ll be in the Midwest and the East Coast in May, sadly without Mark, Erin, or Dennis, but because video evidence of our City Lights appearance seems to be making the internet rounds, maybe you can watch that and when you come to my reading pretend it’s just as interesting. That, at any rate, is the hope.