Brooklyn-based Akashic Books is most widely known for championing
authors of urban fiction and political nonfiction that falls outside
the mainstream, hosting imprints like the Akashic Books Noir series,
Punk Planet Books, and Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery
series. Now, to celebrate 10 years of publishing marginalized and
outlandishly talented literary innovators, Akashic Books is sending
three of its finest storytellers (Chris Abani, Joe Meno, and Felicia
Luna Lemus) to Powell’s for a dynamic and passionate all-star reading
the likes of which cannot be described without a run-on sentence
containing a half dozen dazzling adjectives.
Abani reads from his new novel, Song for Night, which tells
the story of a African boy soldier with severed vocal chords who
journeys through a nightmarish and extraordinary landscape of war. A
Nigerian poet and novelist, Abani’s courageous and lyrical treatments
of difficult subject matter have drawn the attention of critical voices
from Dave Eggers to The Today Show.
Meno, while largely known for his raw account of your adolescence in
the ’90s in Hairstyles of the Damned, reads from his re-issued
debut novel, Tender as Hellfire. In it, eccentrically named
brothers Dough and Pill comb the broken landscape of their trailer park
community, unearthing beauty and the sublime in a confused terrain of
pain and displaced trailer park floozies.
Lemus reads from Like Son, her new novel that follows Frank
Cruz (a 30-year-old post-punk born as a girl named Francisca but
identifying as a man) through present-day New York, the economically
segregated barrios and hills of 1990s Los Angeles, and 1940s Mexico
City, as he grapples with his dead father’s legacy. Frank’s odyssey
into personal identity leads him to an eerie East Village romance, a
relationship later tested by the chaos and devastation of September
11.
Whether writing about gender identity, West African war, the
Mexican avant-garde, or a surreal trailer park littered with
broken-down Impalas, this trio of authors reflects the diverse and
high-caliber material published by Akashic. Marked by wildly different
locales, themes, and styles, the authors share a gift for detailing
personal transformations under dire and chaotic circumstances, which
should make for a gripping author event.