Johnny Temple of Akashic Books on subversion and the future

Johnny Temple, the publisher and co-founder of Akashic Books, was on Sunday’s panel “Publishing: From Keyboard to Bookstore,” and at the independent publisher's booth the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Akashic has published books by Joe Meno and Nina Revoyr, Robert Scheer and, recently, a book of poetry from Ryan Adams called “Infinity Blues.” Temple took a few minutes to speak with us behind the long impromptu Broadway of the festival's exhibitor booths.

Jacket Copy: Are there any ways a smaller publisher can subvert the larger book publishers? To work the currents as a raft in an ocean of big, hulking vessels?

Johnny Temple: It’s nice that we’re not beholden to any corporations or any financial institutions, so the problem of declining book sales is not compounded with any problems in terms of our funding. The challenge for us is to create new kinds of income streams. We’re moving more quickly to digitize our books. We’ve got them in the Kindle format, on Amazon. Finally the digital format is getting traction. We’re looking for ways to do more direct business from our website. We started doing pre-orders for Ryan Adams’ new poetry collection. His fans were really excited that he had a book coming out, so we released a chapbook that was available as a pre-order. We gave a select number of fans something that they could only get from us, and that helped to generate a pretty giant success for us -- at least giant on our scale. With Mike Farrell’s new book, “Of Mule and Man,” we created a limited edition that we’re using not only to make money for Akashic but also as a political fundraising tool for justice organizations like, for example, Death Penalty Focus.

JC: Your “Noir” series has done very well while managing to spout a long chain of localized editions. How did it go from one book to a whole series?

JT: It all started with “Brooklyn Noir.” Tim McLaughlin, the editor of that book, pitched the book to me, and through discussions back and forth, we actually came up with the concept of “Brooklyn Noir:” a bunch of different stories by different authors set in different neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Common wisdom is that anthologies don’t sell, but it sold very well (or well for us) and the concept was easy to then extend to other cities. Every city we went to, we were greeted with open arms. There are now 30 books in print and we’re doing more and more international titles set in Istanbul, Rome, Paris, Copenhagen. In the fall, we’re publishing “Boston Noir” edited by Dennis Lehane, so that’s something I’m really looking forward to. 

Michael J. Fox talks about Parkinson's -- and optimism

People started lining up three hours in advance to see Michael J Fox speak today at the Times Festival of Books.

Shortly after Fox began his discussion with L.A. Times TV critic Mary McNamara, an audience member collapsed and needed first aid. The woman regained consciousness, and Fox resumed discussion of his new book “Always Looking Up.”

Fox hasn't let his battle with Parkinson’s disease get him down; he has chosen instead to focus his life on optimism and dealing with his condition. “I didn’t have a choice in whether or not I got Parkinson’s,” Fox said. “But I have a thousand other choices beyond that.”

Fox also seems to have kept his sense of humor from his days on the TV show “Family Ties.” At one point in the discussion, he compared his rocking and shaking to a move by musician Axl Rose. He also had the audience laughing at his jokes and stories--like the time he told his wife that he was never going to finish his book on optimism.

Fox also discussed his initial resistance to becoming a poster boy for Parkinson’s, but he explained how he created his own take on the matter. “I help organize what holds the poster up,” Fox said. “I can back up what the poster says, so I don’t mind being on that poster.”

When listening to Fox make statements like “when every moment is in negotiation, you value it,” even a person like me, a Type One diabetic, realizes that he or she is not the only one with problems. It’s all in how you deal with those problems that matters.

Joshua Sandoval

Photo: Michael J. Fox, in an earlier photo. Credit: Associated Press

'Outsiders' who bring us comfort

For anyone growing up slightly frightened and unsure of the world, literature can serve as an escape route and a place of discovery. We can connect to those perfect little phrases that elegantly get to the center of how we feel and to the characters that reflect back our own experiences in new and exciting ways. Books and stories are like secret messages from authors, coded with meaning: “Don’t worry, we understand. You are not alone.”

At the fiction panel "Exiles and Outsiders" on Sunday at the Festival of Books, authors Mary Gaitskill, Aimee Bender, Dylan Landis and Giocanda Belli — four female writers described by moderator Donna Rifkind as “not authors you can feel neutral about” — discussed their work and their use of their perceptions as outsiders to connect with readers.

The definition of an outsider shifted from the isolation of literal exile — Belli, who explores the mythic original exiles Adam and Eve in her book “Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve” experienced it keenly in war-torn Nicaragua — to the perceived alienation of being human, which Belli says comes from “being limited by our own bodies.”

 “You can’t constantly belong,” said author and professor Bender. The women agreed that the process of writing involves stepping outside of characters and situations to observe and communicate with fresh eyes what would normally be taken for granted.

Steve Lopez's 'The Soloist': The journey from print to film

Social dramas are usually low on the Hollywood pitch list, but “The Soloist” was a story that went from one newspaper column to a series of columns, to a book, and finally to a movie that was released Friday, which clearly resonated with the nearly 1,200 people who attended a panel about the movie at today's Los Angeles Times' Festival of Books. 

A self-described “angry dinosaur” of journalism, L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez initially regarded  homeless street performer Nathaniel Anthony Ayers with a reporter's constantly watchful eye, thinking his story would just fill another deadline.

“I didn’t think [a movie] was possible,” Lopez told the crowd. But it was -- and discussing the transition from a newspaper column to a Hollywood production were Ben Hong, the music adviser for the movie, Gary Foster, one of the film’s co-producers, and Lopez, with film critic Ella Taylor moderating.

No, newspaper movies aren’t exactly being made left and right, but the essential appeal behind Lopez and Ayers’ story made sense for Hollywood: “It’s a human story about two men finding a common bond,” Foster said.

“It has a 'There but for the grace of God go I' element,” Lopez noted. “It’s a story of second chances.”

The movie was based on Lopez’s "Points West" column and life as he was writing about his encounters with Ayers, but there were a few creative liberties taken in the movie. 

James Ellroy's explosive words -- tapping his inner noir perhaps?

The L.A. Times’ Patt Morrison gave the audience appropriate warning before James Ellroy’s loud and expletive-filled speech at the Book Festival today: “Seat belts fastened low and tight? All right, you’re gonna need 'em.”

Ellroy didn't disappoint. The crime writer, whom Morrison called a “snazzy and dapper fellow,” thanked the audience for coming out, rather than staying home to tend to their “sex lives and drug habits.” He opened with his trademark crowd welcome to the “peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps.” 

And then he exploded with a rather hard-to-follow speech, calling his forthcoming book "Blood's a Rover"  “the greatest novel since the Holy Bible.” The book covers the years 1968 to 1972 and characters such as Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, as well as events in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

John Wray, author of “Lowboy,” was at the panel and said he found it “hilarious and stupid in equal measure, but one thing it wasn’t was boring. … Ellroy is the type of almost obscenely larger-than-life personality that the book business doesn’t have enough of right now.”

A writerly window on the West

Take four writers from the western U.S., place them in Los Angeles and get them talking about their latest books -- all set in this loosely defined geographic and ideological area called "the West" -- and what do you get? A panel on regional literature? Maybe not.

"We're trying to use our backyards to tell American tales," author Mark Arax (co-author of "The King of California") explained at a Book Festival panel today. He referenced his own work with marijuana farmers in a particular corner of Northern California. "That's a story that could only take place in Humboldt County." His latest book, "West of the West," is a collection of these "encounters on the land," stories that are uniquely Californian while illustrating a generally American landscape. "The DNA of America is the West, really," Arax said.

Deanne Stillman agreed.

Social activists, with pen in hand...

A crowd of knowledge-hungry Angelenos packed UCLA’s Korn Convocation Hall this morning to hear the “Writers as Activists” panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Braving the early morning hours and festival traffic, cuppa joe in tow, audience members got much more than they expected -- in a good way.

Moderated by Leslie Schwartz (author of “Angels Crest”), panelists included Sandra Tsing Loh (contributing editor for Atlantic Monthly, commentator for NPR and author of “Mother on Fire”), David Goodman (independent journalist and author of seven books including “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times”) and Donna Foote (former Newsweek correspondent and author of “Relentless Pursuit”).

Each author read an excerpt from their book; Goodman read a captivating passage about a young black boy in rural Jena, La., who dared to sit under “the white tree.” The idea for this book came while doing previous book tours, and meeting people across the country who were inspirational to him and his sister, Amy Goodman, who co-authored the book.

Fiction writers won't disclose their cold cases

One thing that unifies L.A. from its beginning until the present: murder.

Such was the topic of the Book Festival's “Cold Cases” panel hosted by the Mystery Writers of America that featured authors Tom Epperson, Denise Hamilton and Nina Revoyr with Sarah Weinman moderating. Panelists were asked the reason for writing about L.A.'s past, why they chose historical fiction rather than nonfiction and what mistakes they see in from their writing in retrospect.
 
Writing about Los Angeles while living here “is like writing someone a love letter with them in the room,” said Nina Revoyr, author of “Southland” and “The Age of Dreaming.” 

Among the cases that inspired the panelists was the disappearance of Jean Spangler, who vanished after tucking her daughter in to bed in 1949, which was in part the inspiration for Hamilton’s “The Last Embrace.”

Philosophical riffs, and 'Lowboy' on the subway

At today’s L.A. Times Festival of Books fiction panel “The Breaking Point,” discussion veered towardthe heavily philosophical, with novelists John Haskell, Hari Kunzru, John Wray and Antoine Wilson weighing in on matters of social realism, sense of self and unreliable narrators.

Wray noted that one of the many risks of tying a narrative into the larger social scheme of things is that “you could end up writing a sort of polemic, where the novel gets burdened with your own opinions.” This is certainly not the case in “Lowboy,” Wray’s third and latest novel, where his main character, a 16-year-old schizophrenic who’s gone off his meds, takes to the subway, and whose unraveling mind begins to paint a surrealistic perspective of the world around him.

Wray, 37, wrote much of the book on New York subway trains, as he said, wearing a pair of “enormous, ridiculous, noise-canceling headphones.” He’d finished his second novel, “Canaan’s Tongue” and felt completely spent and wasn’t sure what his next book would be about and was “very afraid that it was going to be crap.”

Marilynne Robinson, on 'Home' and places in her heart -- like Iowa

 

When Susan Straight interviewed Marilynne Robinson on Saturday at the Festival of Books, the pairing couldn’t have been stranger.

Straight had ample energy and funny quips. Robinson, on the other hand, was composed, calm and dignified: a persona that matched her prose. She cocked her head to the right as she spoke, as if confiding to the microphone. 

They began by talking about place in Robinson’s fiction. (She was awarded the L.A. Times Book Prize for fiction on Friday night for "Home.") Straight wanted to know whether Gilead, the town of her last two novels, was inspired by a real town.

Robinson initially denied that it did -- “It’s a composite of a bunch of small towns” -- but later admitted the origin of the town’s history: “There is a town in Iowa called Paper. A lot of the history in Gilead is drawn from Paper.” Robinson then complained that many people ignore Iowa, saying folks go to the West Coast and East Coast but skip the middle. To her, the area's beauty is quite unparalleled: “When I travel around Iowa, it looks a lot like France, a lot like Ireland.” She also argued for Iowa’s progressiveness, noting that it  recently passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage.