Get Out: The Akashic All-Stars @ Elliott Bay - Tonight!

Tonight the Elliott Bay Book Co. hosts a trio of writers touring as the "Akashic All-Stars." Akashic is a small literary press based in New York (specifically, Brooklyn--is anything cool left in Manhattan?). Only ten years old, Akashic is a sign of a promising future for American letters. Like the music industry, publishing is being transformed by technology, allowing for smaller firms run by people with both business smarts and passion for what they do to carve out a place for themselves in an increasingly competitive market.

The trio of authors Akashic's showcasing includes the novelists Felicia Luna Lemus and Joe Meno, neither of whom we've read and therefore can't comment on. But trust us--it's worth going for Chris Abani alone. An exiled Nigerian playwright and novelist, Abani was such a thorn in the military regime's side that they even tried to assassinate him in London (prompting his move to the US, where he currently teaches at UCLA).

His novel GraceLand, a harrowing tale about globalism and human trafficking, has been described as

a politically charged coming of age story, but a tale of an entire nation's loss of innocence represented in the life of one boy. And it is this thematic largesse and the stylistic demands to which Abani rises that puts GraceLand in the league of novels like Czeslaw Milosz's The Issa Valley, Oe and even Marquez, each of which tries to describe the loss of an old world in the face of a new one...*

free // 7:30 p.m. @ Elliot Bay Books // 101 South Main Street

*From this author's review in The Seattle Sinner, 2005, as blurbed on Abani's website.