Author and TV showrunner Jim Gavin starts publishing company

So far it has published a single book: ‘Shaky Town,’ set in LA

Publishing is a business, governed by profit and loss like any other business. But publishing is not, like, a good business. Some people do manage to get rich in publishing, but if getting rich is your chief goal, publishing is a lousy place to do it.

Because of this, there’s also a lot of people who get into publishing not for money, but for love. One of those people is Jim Gavin.

I don’t know how I first got turned on to Jim Gavin’s short stories, collected in his 2013 book, “Middle Men.” Maybe it was seeing a blurb that called him “the second coming of Denis Johnson” (“Jesus’ Son”), which would’ve made me both interested and suspicious, given that Johnson was a sui generis writer whose work I could quote from memory.

Turns out that blurb wasn’t wrong. The noir-flecked “Middle Men,” is funny, human, generous and pitiless when it comes to the stories about a series of flawed and hopeful people not finding much luck in modern-day California.

Gavin’s unique eye for character and story caught the eye of television, leading to two seasons as creator and show runner of “Lodge 49” on AMC. “Lodge 49” is unlike anything else on television, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. You can and should catch all 20 episodes on Hulu.

So what does a guy who oversaw a critically acclaimed television show do next?

One thing, as Gavin told me via email, was to “put a new stereo in my Saturn Ion.”

The other is to start a publishing company founded under the following manifesto:

We believe in books.

Our business model is failure.

We plan to lose money and fold quickly. Tiger Van Books is named after the van driven by one of the “Lodge 49” characters, which represents both the off-kilter spirit of the show and Gavin’s vision as a publisher. It’s a publishing company that intends to have fun.

The deeper reason Gavin founded a publishing company is because he wanted to publish a novel by a writer named Lou Mathews, who had been Gavin’s first creative writing teacher at the UCLA Extension school who helped Gavin corral his own interest in writing, and who Gavin considers “the great undiscovered L.A. writer.”

As of now, Mathews’ novel “Shaky Town,” described as being akin to Sherwood Anderson’s classic “Winesburg, Ohio” but set in the world of working-class Los Angeles, is the only book under the Tiger Van imprint. This gives you a small sense of how much Mathews and his work mean to Gavin. Mathews has a story like a lot of great writers most of us never hear about, an earlier book “L.A. Breakdown” that didn’t catch on, enthusiastic agents who can’t get manuscripts over the top at publishers, a subject matter that doesn’t resonate with the chief gatekeepers of the industry.

Gavin believes that Mathews is “someone whose work is worthy to sit alongside American realists like Leonard Gardner and Lucia Berlin,” and is determined to give Mathews and “Shaky Town” the treatment he thinks they deserve, including a jacket design by legendary street artist Steve “ESPO” Powers, and a full hardcover release.

Before closing our correspondence, I pointed out the potentially dubious business proposition of these decisions and Gavin responded, “I’m 100% confident I have no idea what I’m doing. That’s hardly a reason not to do something. My main goal was to make a beautiful book and I wanted to do it in hardcover because Lou deserves a hardcover. Holding it in my hand makes me very happy. Everything else is gravy.”