A parallel plot is playing out between small businesses and indie presses. Last month, the Dry River zine from Gen-Z-run Crybaby Press threw a release party and reading at the Chinatown wine bar Cafe Triste, while the Quarterless Review, a risograph-printed lit magazine from Tiding House, co-hosted a poetry-meets-comedy variety show in Night Gallery’s courtyard with the Erogenous Zone.
Bookstores and cafes work best with this kind of cross-promotion, particularly ones that operate as both. Stories Books & Cafe in Echo Park has always baked events into its business model, especially to attract evening customers, said co-founder Claudia Colodro. Book sales perk up depending on the author and audience, she said, but the cafe enjoys the lion’s share with coffee, beer and wine sales.
Colodro said event nights on their patio have flourished post-pandemic, thanks to events coordinator Chris Molnar, who’s also publisher of Archway Editions, the literary imprint of powerHouse Books (distributed by Simon & Schuster). Archway’s online editor, Caitlin Forst, based her reading residency NDA on the autofiction anthology she edited last year and has brought out marquee authors like Ottessa Moshfegh, Chris Kraus and Jonathan Ames. Molnar and Forst both moved here from New York in 2021, eager to mine the “untapped reserve” of young and “unpublishable” writers in L.A.
“The writers who live in L.A. have a better grasp of performance,” Molnar said. “I think it’s a generalization that can be made because it’s something you’re around more out here.”
In March, Miranda July headlined NDA’s standing-room-only reading on Stories’ patio. The soft-spoken writer-director told the admiring audience that she agreed to Forst’s DM request partly because it was the same date as her book deadline. The motivation worked, and she read the first chapter of her forthcoming novel from a heavy-set manuscript.
Jasmine Johnson read that same night among author-celebrities like July, Robert Glück and Michelle Tea. She ran into the crowd 30 minutes late and sat on the floor until it was her turn, rattling off flash fiction with the fluent vim and vigor of a pharmaceutical commercial’s legal disclaimer. It was funny, transgressive, absurd — and she knew it.
“I wonder what it’s like to OD,” she read. “Oh wait, been there, done that, and I got a book deal out of it. Thanks, Archway!”