Akashic Books
by Gretta Cohn

Akashic Books is an independent, Brooklyn-based publishing company that has distinguished itself among the growing front-line of indie presses. Akashic’s articulate co-founder Johnny Temple (also of GVSB) hand-selects its catalogue of books new and old, from writers of radical political fiction to cultural observers to punk poets and musicians (bookended, of course, by a few Girls Against Boys 7 inches). I met up with Johnny in midtown Manhattan on October 5th. A last-minute change of plans took us out of the East Village and into the heart of New York City at rush hour. So, we ducked into the Astro Diner, but not before first stopping in at The Mysterious Bookshop, just around the corner, to speak with the owner and check out the prominent display of Akashic’s most recent book - THE BIG MANGO. Sitting at the diner counter with a cup of tea and a tape recorder, Johnny and I spoke for some time about his work with Akashic.

Let’s start by talking a little bit about the history of Akashic Press. Didn’t it initially start out as a record label?
I started it as a record label, with my two old friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan...

Was that in 1995?
Yeah, yeah, it was about ‘95. And they’re old friends. I used to play in a band in DC in the eighties with Bobby, called Soulside. We were on Dischord Records. Mark was a musician as well, so we started this little label. I always wanted to have a record label; I was always so inspired by the independent record labels that my bands got to work with. I always thought it was the coolest approach to music, and so we did it and then Mark, one of my two partners, had written a book that he never had published, so I said, "why don’t we try publishing your book." His book is still not yet published, but it was kind of inspired us to, say, well, oh, let’s publish books! And as soon as we published the first book, which was in 1997, THE FUCK-UP by Arthur Nersesian, Bobby, about that time dropped out. He got married and had a baby and moved down to North Carolina, and we published THE FUCK-UP. And it was so fun, so cool to work with books that I pretty much immediately lost interest in running a record label, and quickly, as I started doing books I quickly started phasing out the records. We published one book in 1997, another book in 1998, which was ONCE THERE WAS A VILLAGE, by Yuri Kapralov, and then in 1999 we published MASSAGE by Henry Flesh. And then Mark Sullivan left the company, because he also, coincidentally, got married and had a baby, and got way too busy to think about, you know, reading manuscripts all day! And also had to earn a hell of a lot of money to raise a kid in New York City, and left me solo. That was in 1999 – we published two books that year, then OUTCAST - a Cuban-based mystery book. And then in 2000 things really started to get rolling and we’re now publishing lots of books.

Didn’t you begin with reprints? Why reprints and how did you transition to new titles?
Actually, the first two books we did were reprints, and nothing since then has been a reprint, but in my mind I don’t really make a separation there. To me an amazing book is an amazing book and I know you have to treat reprints differently, but, the kind of book we would reprint would be a book no one – like, we ONCE THERE WAS A VILLAGE, by Yuri Kapralov, who do I know that has ever heard off that?! I mean, met like one or two people that had ever heard of him before, so even though it was a reprint, it was kind of...you know, it felt no different than bringing something out for the first time.

What were your motivations for starting up Akashic?
I like the idea of spreading books, spreading music. Showing - it’s like DJing a party - like, listen to this cool music that I love and that I hope you love it too. When my band - my band put out records on independent labels for years - I was in one band on Dischord Records in DC and one band on Touch and Go Records from Chicago. Those two record labels, to me, were just so inspirational. It was like, as bands, it was like these wonderful people who kick ass who help you with your music and you bring your music to them and they suddenly make you a lot more known than you were before. They’re cool people and they treat you fair, and they don’t squander the money themselves, and they give you half the profits that they make. Totally different from the music industry. So that when Girls Against Boys, finally, in 1997, signed to Geffen Records, we went into it knowing what we were doing. It was a way for us also to make a lot of money, and in fact, without us having done that I could never have started Akashic. It gave me the money....by moving to Geffen. However, being on a major record label like that just reinforces to me all of my preconceptions about it - all the stereotypes of the corporate music industry - it’s all true. It’s a horribly corrupted, poisoned industry, and book publishing is headed in the same direction. So when my band did this it reaped some of the rewards, you know, we got a big advance and stuff. I definitely felt like I needed to create a counter-balance in my life, other than, you know, my band used to be my one creative passion, but it never would sit well with me, and I think with all of us in the band on a certain level, of like who it is that we’re doing business with here, how much cooler the other people were, maybe, who couldn’t really earn a living being an indie-rock band, you know, when you get to your thirtieth birthday and you need health insurance, but, there was a certain...I still felt like I really wanted to be a part of more of the independent cultural movement, hence the independent, little record label, finally motivating to do that. But I wanted to. And now that my band is on Geffen, I have a little bit more money, now is the time to start an indie label and keep it indie..and then it became an indie book company, and it’s incredible! It’s an incredible time to be doing it because the big book companies leave untouched so many great books. They’re not even interested in the books that I think are the best books, the big companies also publish incredible books, in their back catalogues they all have impressive histories. But right now? Literary fiction? The big companies don’t even know where to find it, there are just all these incredible books that no one is publishing, and so Akashic and other indie presses get to publish this stuff, and it’s great. Unfortunately it’s not a very lucrative field. But creatively it’s wonderful, it’s so inspirational, reading these books that people write..it’s great...

You mentioned Dischord and Touch and Go. In the way that they present a particular kind of aesthetic, it seems to me that Akashic is doing something similarly like, whether it be a certain kind of lived experience, political or cultural experience, or something that’s explicitly about an historical event, like the Falun-Gong, or the upcoming collection of writings from Punk Planet, and even when we were talking about THE BIG MANGO (Akashic’s latest release) – how it’s a mystery genre that really up-ends preconceived ideas about such a genre...Would you say that there’s a particular aesthetic going on with Akashic?
Yeah, it’s really tricky, because, for me, the aesthetic is books I like. Because it’s hard for me not to...I mean, I read a book, and I love it and think it should be published it’s hard for me to not then want to publish it. Because we’re starting to publish too many books in a way, because there’s so much great stuff. There need to be more indie book companies, but, so going back to this aesthetics, um...It’s hard because I know I’m always going to be breaking out of the aesthetic. Right now, my starting point is like a classic liberal, like: "writings by blacks, Jews and lesbians" you know, or something like: "special interest groups; Latino writers" you know, to conservative people or whatever Akashic would look just so typical of, like: "the multicultural blah-blah-blah." However, to me it’s one of the fun things to do when you’re starting. One of the fun things about starting up is the spectrum of authors like that is, you know, the whole notion of political correctness is...I actually think that political correctness is just a bad name, because to me what political correctness has always represented has been social equality, and people are like, "it’s so closed minded, blah-blah-blah"..and I think there are a few closed-minded politically correct people, but I think it’s a good thing that politically correct values have invaded our society, certainly if people are going to be treated better...certainly people continue to be discriminated against, really harshly...but, anyway, I think there’s a lot of Akashic titles that break out of these - they show that you can publish an African-American who is writer breaking the rules of what African-American writers are "supposedly allowed" to say. MASSAGE by Henry Flesh was very provocative. It was a really harsh example of AIDS. You know, a lot of gay literature is alleged to have these happy endings so that the community can feel an uplift, whereas Henry is just like "No. This is fucking bleak." You see whole social groups being decimated, and how the fragile human personality contends with that. And publishing stuff that challenges the boundaries - the social boundaries of what’s being published - you’re both advancing a politically correct agenda, while enriching it as well. So to me that’s one of the aesthetics, like, enriching a political perspective based on social justice. But, ok, so social justice doesn’t have to be dry here, you can have, like, raunchy sex in your social justice movement! You can have complex thoughts, you can portray characters who are racist and you can portray them honestly, as a complete human being... Akashic, the aesthetic of Akashic is both simultanesously PC and Anti-PC, I don’t know if that makes sense...

That makes total sense..
You know the comedian Lenny Bruce, he’s an old Jewish comedian. And he used to really shock and provoke audiences by using really, like, racist language, but as a way of trying to rob the words of their meaning...

That’s a sort of tricky thing, though. You never know when it’s being used in a productive way or in a harmful way...
Absolutely, and you’re absolutely right because every book I publish I get really nervous, that it’s going be taken..like, THE BIG MANGO for example, you have a male writer writing a female protagonist, and there’s also a lot of central characters are lesbians, and you have what’s presumed to be a heterosexual man writing these things, and some people don’t want to hear that, especially when he perhaps can’t get inside of a woman as well as a woman can herself? So, so maybe he shouldn’t try? Well fuck that! Just because he can’t see through a woman’s eyes doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t write a woman’s character. Even if his woman character acts like a man, so what! There’s nothing intellectually wrong with that, in fact, it’s refreshing! It depends upon the style....Those are just some of the interesting issues that make me nervous about publishing, because we do challenge these lines and - I don’t want to upset people. Like, publishing MASSAGE by Henry Flesh who takes a provocative look at AIDS, well I don’t have any interest in terrorizing people with AIDS, or forcing them to look at this grim reality, that’s not what I’m interested in. So I’m just nervous about that, I was just like, I don’t want to upset a bunch of people who already have to deal with this horror...(Ultimately Akashic expected bad reviews for MASSAGE, but this did not occur. The feedback was, in fact, positive.-ed) The media likes to present people as being closed-minded...and people can be closed-minded. But I’ve encountered primarily open-minded responses to these titles, which I think is encouraging.

Do you think that the positive response to these novels is due, in part, to the communities that you are surrounded by? The other small presses that are actively based in downtown New York, like Soft Skull or Incommunicado, or others...Do you think there is a community?
Oh yeah, there is. There really is. It’s a great thing. And, as with every community, you know, you can spend just as much time criticizing it as you could praising it, but again, coming from music, where, rock music hyped way beyond what should be accepted. In classical music you have musical form, and in rock music you have music and image. You know, there’s more than just music, there’s a lot of other stuff going on as well. And, going from that in rock music, pop music to books, to people where are more bookish, and it’s not so cool and it’s not so hyped, and there’s a little more humility, and there’s a little bit more...People are more connected to the ground. You know, rock music people in the rock and roll industry, in the music industry, people leave the ground, they think they’re super human, and people who are reading books know that they’re alone! (laughs) And so that maybe they are a little more humble in their community and so...I think, Gary from Incommunicado, Sander from Soft Skull, Yuri from SOHO, the people from AK Press, the people from Henry Rollins’ company 2.13.61 – all these people were so cool to me and just really helped me to get started and without that I really wouldn’t have known what I was doing,...Probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it, and so you have these people who are so interested in what you are doing and maybe give you the benefit of the doubt and so when you are publishing the stuff that’s kind of provocative you have a supportive community that can disagree with you, but won’t start by trying to declare you illegitimate...There’s a whole group of people that, no questions asked, an indie book is just as cool as a book on Harper Collins. There’s no reason to think that this book by this big company is any better. And, in fact, you might be biased towards the indie book because you know all the work, all the personal work, that’s gone into it and everyone knows, no one’s making any money. A few people make money, but doing indie books...people are just like busting their asses night and day, and we would all love to make money, we are inspired to do it, but, you know, (laughs) as soon as someone finds out - spread the little formula! So we have people that are impassioned, and so it’s a passion-driven industry. When I visited Consortium, who distributes Akashic’s books, they’re based in St. Paul, Minnesota and they distribute sixty-five different indie publishers, you just walk down the warehouses with all the different titles by all the different publishers - it’s incredible that people spend all their time publishing books about fish or whatever obscure, whatever little obscure interest theirs happens to be...Mine happens to be politically infused literary fiction, political non-fiction. Other people like books about aqua marine life, or, poems that could not be more obscure and more beautiful. You have this whole industry that’s built around people who live, who aren’t making money..you know, people are getting by, but it’s not like the music industry or the corporate book publishing industry where you have lawyers making fundamental decisions that drastically, significantly affect creative decisions. It’s just... it’s great, it’s great. You don’t have to be rich in this society. It’s great if you can get by, if you can just scrape by and be a middle-class American. Being a middle class American is just a blessing, you know, to try to set up your industry so that you can be an upper-class American corrupts the art that you are working with. Or, it seems to. What I’ve seen in the music industry is just, ugh, I don’t want to be associated with that. You know, like, you and your fancy dinners. I like living nicely, but the whole corporate vision is just - who needs that, who wants that. Think a little harder. Look at the world around you, there’s a lot more fun in life than this homogenized crap that’s dished out by all the major media outlets, whether it’s internet, TV, books or music. There’s...that’s my little soapbox!

Speaking of which...Did Akashic have any involvement with Blackout Books?
Well, Blackout carried Akashic books for a while, but I think they lost interest in us, which I was very disappointed in....For one thing, they’re not really focused on fiction, and I would like to think that one of the things I would like to do with Akashic, is to say, hey, fiction is political, fiction is anarchist....We published a book by a Cuban writer, OUTCAST. It was the first Cuban mystery book to be published in America, doing it in a way that’s like, you don’t see the big companies publishing this stuff...This is in some ways a politically radical book and they [Blackout], they weren’t interested, and I was like, "darn..." so I think it’s really cool what they tried to keep going...Blackout books was totally cool...I say that more as a shopper...but, for Akashic, they never seemed to groove on us too much.

I saw your recent piece in Bust, and also your past articles in The Nation. You definitely present some great arguments in those short pieces...Where do you see yourself as a writer?
I would love to learn one day to be a writer. And I would love to make the investment to really learn how to write. I do know how to write, well - I’m well educated, so I know how to construct an argument, and I edit a lot and I know how to use words, but I think to be a really great writer you have to just like jump in and go, ok, I’m going to write for three years, and none of this is going to be ever see the light of day. As it is now, I write if I have a reason to write. If I have an argument I want to make...or some point I want to make...So it’s as much about the politics that I’m stating or the argument I’m making as it is about my writing. Um, so I like to write, I love to write, but I guess I wouldn’t say I am a writer. I really admire writers and you know, how many years people…Arthur Nersesian, who was working on six different novels for an average of four and a half years each, you know, and every night he’s there writing, it’s just, to me - that to me is a really wonderful thing that can be a model for me..but I’m not headed there yet. I’m too busy!

So, you’ve said that recently you’ve experienced something of a boom with Akashic, publishing more titles, presenting more. With that probably comes more manuscripts to read and choose between...Where do you see all of this going?
Actually, there’s less, because we’ve stopped. We’ve had to close our doors to most incoming manuscripts. It’s just too..there's just too many, we don’t have the resources to keep up. It takes so much time to read manuscripts, I mean, we read them, we read them really carefully, and so I liked before having an open-door policy. Send us your book, you know, and we’ll check it out, and let you know, but I realize that we had read literally nearly a hundred manuscripts, out of which we selected one, so, I just thought - and I was relying a lot on interns, and people to help fish out the good one, and there are lots of good ones. So even though I say it’s a hundred to one ratio, most of the stuff we publish I find through friends, or through other writers. Stuff that just comes in with the mail isn’t as good as stuff that I randomly find or that go I search out based on my own interests. Sometimes I go actively looking for certain types of things, like I want to publish a book on Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, DC...So... it’s hard, though, I’m reaching a point where I have to close my doors to books that I want to publish, which I can’t bear. But there are too many great books. I consider myself to be highly selective in terms of what we publish, and right now I’m reading a manuscript, and you know, it’s great, it’s just got to get published. It may not be as good as these other ones that I’m publishing, but if I didn’t have so many books, then, sure, I'd love to publish this, but, um, there’s only so much that...If I can turn Akashic - if Akashic can start to pay for itself then I can keep it, I would know I can keep this going...I can build here, and that I can hire people on. Like, right now there’s one full-time person, Johanna, who totally kicks-butt, and then there’s some other part-time people, and a lot of people, many who donate their time, essentially. I would love to be able to hire people to be able to publish more books, so I need to be able to find a way to do that. Right now I just want to publish, but right now my goal is to do, is to – there’s no projection. I want to do what I’m doing now, I love this, I totally love this. Cool manuscripts, published or not, interact with cool literary communities, interesting, different subcultures. We’re putting out the PUNK PLANET book, you know, and you’re reaching a punk rock, a politically progressive audience, you publish, THE BIG MANGO, I’m sort of reaching out to a politically savvy audience, an African-American readership...

So that those audiences overlap and learn...
...And that’s the whole point - to get them overlapping, to get these communities to put down their little barriers and to appreciate each others’ art, because there’s such wonderful art and not many writers like to be classified by the communities that they’re in - it’s ridiculous, you have authors like Henry Flesh who’ll be described as a "gay author," or something like that, which is - he is - there’s no such thing, you’re an author...what does his sexual preference have to do with it? And that can be really frustrating for him, and that’s part of the reason that I think he wanted to come to Akashic because I think he was hoping for a company that wouldn’t pigeon-hole him, and that would have the resources to reach multiple audiences while not neglecting the readership that’s gay, that’s drawn towards his writing. And, quite frankly, the gay literary community, gay-focused publications hugely support him. So, I want to keep doing this, but I want to be able to... Right now I earn a living from my band, and my band, the money I’ve made from my band pays for the investment of Akashic, and my goal is to keep doing what I’m doing but to be able to pay rent and you know, to be able to, if my band were to ever stop paying the rent, for me to be able to pay my rent and health insurance...and to keep publishing these great books. I love it, It’s not some distant thing I’m trying to reach – it’s so great, that I can sit at my Akashic desk and do this stuff! It’s so fun.

Akashic’s newest title is THE BIG MANGO by Norman Kelley. For more information, from their back-catalogue to upcoming events and readings, see www.akashicbooks.com.