This book, our most recent addition to the "Little House on the Bowery" imprint (curated by Dennis Cooper), is in a lot of ways the most fascinating, bizarre, surreal, and playful book I've encountered in awhile. The narration, featuring Elsa Schiaparelli as a vampire, and including Schiaparelli's...
Johnny Temple (Akashic's founder) and I represented Akashic Books at the Harlem book fair. Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka spent the afternoon signing books. (Johnny and Melvin)(Left to right: Johnny, Amiri, Melvin)Our table was somewhere in the middle...
Sidney Zion has died. I knew him because he was very close to a relative of mine. For a variety of reasons, I borrowed his last name for the Ruth Zion character in Triangle.Like Sidney Zion, Ruth Zion is relentless, dogged in her pursuit of material in support of her agenda. Like Sidney, she is...
We've gotten a few reviews back on a new title of ours, "GLOBETROTTER & HITLER'S CHILDREN," a poetry collection by Amatoritsero Ede on Chris Abani's Black Goat imprint here at Akashic Books.Poetry reviews tend to be just as obscure, or sometimes murkier than the poetry itself—which is already...
"The audience, they don't laugh so much as applaud, and what they're applauding is their own recognition of the references, so it's a separate reality that Carlos Castaneda never dreamed of."
Barely restraining my anger, I made him say the word 'niche' with me. We pronounced the word variously, and he chose his favorite rendition. I then informed him, 'The mainstream is a hallucination. It is the opium dream of plump buffoons and tyrants, who categorically deny the ascendancy of niches...
In "Of Song and Water", Joseph Coulson compresses the multigenerational sweep of a family epic into the humble confines of a small novel about middle-aged regret.
I grew up in a wealthy, Westside neighborhood and attended schools dreamt up by former hippies. The city's racial metaphor for me felt like a pot of soup with a nice, chef salad, something casual and light and accompanied by a glass of iced tea.
Recently I've read a number of memoirs about the terrible things that can happen to ordinary, well-meaning middle-class parents when their children approach adolescence: their offspring can develop eating disorders, run away, or turn into meth addicts, among countless other horrors.
