5 Indie L.A. Presses You Should Know
Note: An old, but still relevant article on Los Angeles publishing.
The continuing upheavals and bleak realities of the intersecting worlds of publishing houses and big-box retailers this year have made the normally reliable little joy of picking up a new book a minefield of guilt and ennui. From Amazon’s bad-faith feud with Hachette Book Group (way to play dirty, Bezos) to the more quotidian bummer of the perpetually middle-of-the-road offerings on the book tables at Costco and Wal-Mart, it’s more important to buy indie and local now than ever. But when it comes to books, it can be hard for even the most dedicated reader to know where to find the latest and greatest small and indie presses.
The exciting small publishing houses profiled below are located right here in L.A. All offer tomes that you can find at beloved haunts like Skylight in Los Feliz and Diesel in Brentwood for those all-important last-minute stocking stuffers.
ut a week late in posting this. Last week it was announced by the Before Columbus Foundation that Los Angeles poet, Peter J. Harris, won an American Book Award for his book of personal essays, The Black Man of Happiness. He is a native of Southeast DC and an alumnus of Ballou High School and Howard University. He is also the author of Bless the Ashes, poetry (Tia Chucha Press). He has published his work in a wide variety of publications since the 1970s. Since 1992, he’s been a member of the Anansi Writers Workshop at the World Stage, in LA’s Leimert Park. Mike Sonksen at 
ity Review
s literature has deep roots. It essentially began in 1884 with Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. Visiting writers like Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, have attempted to explain this sprawling metropolis. To criticize it because the city didn’t conform to the places they were from or couldn’t see Los Angeles beyond the confines of Hollywood. Other writers have moved to L.A. like Mona Simpson and Attica Locke and have made a life here, writing about the city or being too intimidated to try. But Los Angeles literature has increasingly become a literature written by its natives, shifting it from a literature of exile to a literature of belonging. Writers from Boyle Heights/East L.A., like Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis Rodríguez; Watts like Kamau Daáood and Wanda Coleman; Leimert Park like A.K. Toney; the Westside like 2014 Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman; the young adult fiction of Francesca Lia Block; to Alex Espinoza, Amy Uyematsu, Naomi Hirahara, Helena María Viramontes and Steve Erickson are desperate to communicate their experience and tell us what they mean. To these writers Los Angeles is fundamentally home.
