Nina Revoyr seems to have struck a nerve. Her second novel, Southland, peels back the layers of urban blight in a South Central Los Angeles neighborhood to reveal the intersecting lives of Japanese, black and white residents over six sometimes harmonious, sometimes bitter decades. There's a historical mystery, involving the long-unreported murder of four black teenagers during the 1965 Watts uprisings, which is discovered by a Japanese-American law student when she looks into her grandfather's will. And there's the contemporary story of the protagonist's lesbian love affair gone wrong. But prominent reviews in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Washington Post and a handful of regional alternative weeklies have located the novel's potency most of all in its haunting sense of place.
That coverage, combined with the book's atmospheric jacket, its affordable paperback format (priced at $15.95), and selection by Book Sense has added up to a notable success for Akashic Books. The six year-old press, which publishes about 20 works of urban literary fiction and political nonfiction a year, has reported sales of 10,000 copies since Southland's publication in April.
So how did this L.A. writer—whose first novel, The Necessary Hunger, was published in hardcover by S&S in 1997—end up at an edgy Brooklyn house? The short answer is lesbian recruitment. It began with novelist Lauren Sanders, who knew several writers published by the fledgling press in its early years. She became the house's first female author when publisher Johnny Temple signed up her debut novel of sapphic self-discovery, Kamikaze Lust (2000), in which a young woman unleashes her inner porn star while simultaneously grappling with the impending death of a beloved aunt. That trade paperback became a Venus Book Club pick, won a Lambda literary award and sold 6,000 copies after three printings.
Encouraged by Akashic's supportive handling of her book, Sanders introduced her friend T. Cooper to Temple, who agreed to publish Cooper's Some of the Parts as a paperback original. That first novel, about the tangled ties among four gender-bending outsiders, became a Barnes & Noble Discover Award finalist and QPB and InsightOut book club picks, selling an impressive 15,000 copies since its publication last September. Translation rights have been sold in Italy and Turkey as well.
So when Sanders heard that Revoyr's novel had been rejected by the major houses to which Russell and Volkening agent Tim Seldes had submitted it, she knew where to send her. And Revoyr, like Sanders and Cooper, was ready to do what was necessary to see her book succeed at the small house.
"These are all perfect Akashic authors—very self-motivated," said Temple. Each has toured as many as 30 cities, he explained, bringing their books to a wider market than Akashic would reach by relying solely on its distributor, Consortium. "Since we're a small company with limited financial resources, it makes a big difference that they've been able to shoulder the financial burden of touring," added Temple.
Booksellers have been supportive, too. At Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, owner Jim Harris praised the house for its good taste in fiction and the kind of savvy marketing that induced him to read several Akashic titles without having heard of the press before. "I always look forward to seeing the [Akashic] catalogue," agreed Karen Maeda Allman, an events coordinator at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. "The books are a little different, a little edgy. There's always something to read in there—it's not hype. Plus, the jackets look good and they do some good promotional work for their books."
Allman also sees a reflection of Akashic's independent sensibility in Revoyr's Southland. "In Nina's book, there's a fair amount of historical detail," she said. "You get the feeling that editors at bigger houses might have told her to take that out, or to round out the love story, or play up the mystery. But that kind of detail is one of the best things in the novel—it's about really looking at the place where you come from."
According to Revoyr, her lesbian protagonist was also a stumbling block. Editors told her "that the reading public 'wasn't ready' for a book that explored larger sociopolitical issues through a protagonist who's gay," she said in an interview posted on the Akashic Web site.
But for Temple, Southland's mystery plot simply put it "at the more mainstream end of the Akashic catalogue." And as far as he's concerned, the reluctance of bigger houses to publish midlist fiction with lesbian protagonists has been his gain.
