Akashic Launches Classic Reprint Series
By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 8/13/2008 6:50:00 AM
Brooklyn-based indie house Akashic Books is launching AkashiClassics: Renegrade Reprint series, a line that will bring important works by a range of significant writers back into print. The series will launch in January with Home: Social Essays, a critically acclaimed collection of nonfiction essays by Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), the much lauded and controversial African-American poet/playwright/novelist and political activist, originally published in 1966.
Later the same year the house will publish The Hungered One, a collection of short stories by noted African-American playwright Ed Bullins, originally published in 1971. The house has also acquired the rights to publish Baraka’s Black Music, a seminal collection of Baraka’s music criticism focused on jazz and the blues that was originally published in 1968. The books will feature new introductions by their authors and Bullins and Baraka will team up for a national book tour to promote the titles.
Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple said the new series will initially focus on radical African American literary figures, “but we may not stick to that exclusively. There’s a lot of material that we’d love to do.” Temple said he’s launching the reprint series in the wake of last year’s publication of Tales of the Out and the Gone, a collection of stories by Baraka that sold more than 10,000 copies, garnered impressive critical praise and media attention. He credited the black press with the book’s success--“They embraced Baraka and the book”--and also pointed to foreign rights sales, a PEN literary award and New York Times coverage of the title. “One of our proudest achievements has been to help Amiri revive his literary career,” said Temple.
Both Baraka, a member of the Beat generation of poets who evolved into both a black nationalist and, later, a Marxist literary activist, and Bullins, an Obie Award winner and founder of the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, were important figures in the radical 1960s Black Arts Movement. Temple said both Baraka’s and Bullins’s works “stood the test of time.” Despite some “dated language,” he said, Baraka’s essay on white liberalism in Home: Social Essays, “would work today, especially in a presidential election year. It’s 40 years old but Baraka’s ideas are still refreshing.”
