I don’t like to talk about myself, and I don’t like small talk. Guess that makes me the odd man out in LA.
The scene before me spread out like the opening of a movie. Interior establishing shot. A party. Extras hovering around, moving lips without anything coming out. Even with a bunch of people all grouped together, the place felt sparse. Ten thousand square feet and twenty-five-foot ceilings will have that effect.
What was I doing here, in a penthouse loft on Spring Street?
Dance music from the 80s pushed out of a 90s plastic boom box, the kind that looked like the front end of a car. No one was dancing.
Every Friday, the Akashic team highlights industry news, reviews, and features from around the web. This week’s roundup comes to you from Akashic publicist Kate Bogden and intern Deanna Hoffmann.
With the official publication of Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos just days away, Simon Tofield, creator of the worldwide smash hit Simon’s Cat phenomenon, prepares to embark upon his first-ever book tour of the United States . . .
I’m driving over the Francis R. Buono Memorial Bridge for the nine hundredth time (figuring once a week, four times a month, times twelve months, times eighteen years). The bridge connects the Queens mainland to Rikers Island, which is floating in the East River and a mere hundred yards off the runways of LaGuardia Airport. Rikers Island is the main New York City jail, housing 12,000 or more inmates at any given time, depending on how tough on crime the NYPD chooses to be. Rikers Island is America’s largest penal colony, a city of rolling razor wire far as the eye can see. I’m en route there because I’m a lawyer assigned by the Criminal Courts to defend a fellow who claims to be “indigent” (no dough to hire a lawyer), so he gets me, whom the inmates call “an 18-B” (short for the section of the County Law), as distinguished from “a real, paid lawyer,” whom they’d hire if they could. I pay no mind; I’ve heard it all before . . .
Every Friday, the Akashic team highlights industry news, reviews, and features from around the web. This week’s roundup comes to you from Akashic publicist Kate Bogden and intern Deanna Hoffmann.
Welcome to Akashic in Good Company, a weekly column featuring managing editor Johanna Ingalls’s interviews and profiles with many of the remarkable people in the publishing industry today. Over the past fifteen years, Akashic has worked with an amazing array of talented, hard-working, committed people and Akashic would not be the company it is today without their help and advice along the way. This week’s installment features Louise Steinman, curator of Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ ALOUD Series at the Central Library.
