There are 17 classic stories, reprinted in black and white. Contains the complete stories “The Portier Fortune,” “Saree,” “The School For Girls,” “Saree Falls In Love,” “Il Fuce’s Locket,” “Black Gold (The Lands of Ben Adim),” “Competition,” “Money,” “Assignment Paris (The Spanish Jewels),” “Teachers Pet,” “The Seventh Husband,” “A Ticket Home,” “The Loot Of Robinson Crusoe (The Island Of Pearls),” “Staple Springs,” “L’Spirit,” “The Incident of the Sitting Duck,” and “The Capistrano Jewels.”

    Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.Brand-new stories by: Chaim Cigan, Martin Goffa, Irena Hejdová, Michaela Klevisová, Štěpán Kopřiva, Ondrej Neff, Markéta Pilátová, Jirí "Walker" Procházka, Petra Soukupová, Petr Stančík, Michal Sýkora, Petr Šabach, Kateřina Tučková, and Miloš Urban.While Prague might today be one of the world's top tourist destinations, and a cosmopolitan capital of European culture, it remains an open-air monument to a history of violence. Here, Prague's top writers explore the hidden corners of the "City of a Hundred Spires," pulling back the curtain to reveal gloom and despair.From the introduction by Pavel Mandys:How to write noir in a city where, until 1990, the profession of private detective hadn't existed? Where the censors insisted on portraying police in the media and literature in a positive light? Where freelance organized crime hadn't existed, but where the largest criminal group was the secret police? Before you delve into the fourteen stories in this collection, a heads-up: most of the stories owe their allegiance more to Prague than the noir genre...but if the concept of "noir" is extended, and considered a characterization of literary works containing elements of crime, danger, threat--or where central characters find themselves in critical life situations--then you will find fourteen such stories in this collection.

    Richard Lingeman examines a brief but momentous and crowded time, the years between VJ Day and the beginning of the Korean War, describing how we got from there to here. It evokes the social and cultural milieu of the late forties, with the vicissitudes of the New Deal Left and Popular Front culture from the end of one hot war and the beginning of the cold one—and, longer term, of a cold war that preoccupied the United States for the next fifty years. It traces the attitudes, sentiments, hopes and fears, prejudices, behavior, and collective dreams and nightmares of the times, as reflected in the media, popular culture, political movements, opinion polls, and sociological and psychological studies of mass beliefs and behavior.

    Boll weevils have devoured his cotton crop, his chickens have stopped laying eggs, and everything he owns is mortgaged — even his cow. He has no money, no prospects, and nothing to do but hang around filling stations, wondering where his next drink will come from. As far as hooch goes, there's no place like Smut Milligan's, where Breath of Spring moonshine sells for a dollar a pint. A bootlegger with an entrepreneurial spirit, Milligan has plans to open a roadhouse, and he asks Jack to run the till. The music will be hot, the liquor cheap, and the clientele rough. But the only thing stronger than Milligan's hooch is his greed, and Jack is slowly drawn into the middle of Smut's dalliances with a married woman, the machinations of corrupt town officials — and a savage act of murder.

    But you wake up today in another world, where the fearsome crime fighter is just a character you play in a radio show that bears his name. You are no longer a man with a mission, just a 22 year old prodigy with an impressive voice, and a lot of questions... an honored guest who has been invited into... the Twilight Zone.

    Every day blood is spilled. Every place that rain falls, it washes away some of the red that stains the streets.Eliminating every killer in the Sixth World is as impossible as drying up every raindrop in a storm, but Thomas McAllister doesn’t want to get rid of all of them. Just one. He’s been on this killer’s trail for a while, and he knows he’s getting closer. The only question is if he’ll be able to handle getting as close as he’s about to be, or if his blood will join the stream that regularly flows into the gutters of the sprawls.

    This collection includes Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Max Allan Collins, and Alex Toth—plus adaptations of and collaborations by famous crime writers, such as Dashiel Hammett, Mickey Spillane, Lesley Charteris, and Raymond Chandler.

    Miss Crawford rose from being a telephone operator in Kansas City to glamour, glitter, romance and ultimate stardom.

    The next day, a dazed and confused Pete Dayton is found in Madison's cell. Dayton has no memory of how he came to be there. Madison has gone missing. What follows may be reality or it may be part of a highly organized hallucination that Fred Madison is undergoing. Lost Highway refuses to yield its secrets readily. It communicates, not just through words, but through images and - most of all - through the mental states these words and images conjure up.

    

    Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. In Hong Kong Noir, fourteen of the city’s finest authors explore the dark heart of the Pearl of the Orient in haunting stories of depravity and despair.Brand-new stories by: Jason Y. Ng, Xu Xi, Marshall Moore, Brittani Sonnenberg, Tiffany Hawk, James Tam, Rhiannon Jenkins Tsang, Christina Liang, Feng Chi-shun, Charles Philipp Martin, Shannon Young, Shen Jian, Carmen Suen, and Ysabelle Cheung.From the introduction by Jason Y. Ng & Susan Blumberg-Kason:What will Hong Kong look like in five years, ten years, or thirty years—when the “one country, two systems” promise expires? It’s impossible to foresee. Hong Kong’s future may not be within our control, but some things are. We can continue to write about our beloved city and work our hardest to preserve it in words. When we asked our contributors to write their noir stories, we didn’t give them specific content guidelines other than to make sure their stories end on a dark note. What we received was a brilliant collection of ghost stories, murder mysteries, domestic dramas, cops-and-robbers tales, and historical thrillers that capture Hong Kong in all its dark glory. The result is every bit as eclectic, quirky, and delightful as the city they write about.

    Ortiz, Ena Lucia Portela, Mariela Varona Roque, and Yoss.??To most outsiders, Havana is a tropical sin city: a Roman ruin of sex and noise, a parallel universe familiar but exotic, and embargoed enough to serve as a release valve for whatever desire or pulse has been repressed or denied. Habaneros know that this is neither new--long before Havana collapsed during the Revolution's Special Period, all the way back to colonial times, it had already been the destination of choice for foreigners who wanted to indulge in what was otherwise forbidden to them--nor particularly true.In the real Havana--the lawless Havana that never appears in the postcards or tourist guides--the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need--aching and hungry--inevitably turns the human heart darker, feral, and criminal. In this Havana, crime, though officially vanquished by revolutionary decree, is both wistfully quotidian and personally vicious.In the stories of Havana Noir, current and former residents of the city--some international sensations such as Leonardo Padura, others exciting new voices like Yohamna Depestre--uncover crimes of violence and loveless sex, of mental cruelty and greed, of self-preservation and collective hysteria.Achy Obejas is the award-winning author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo, and We Came all the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies. A long-time contributor to the Chicago Tribune, she was part of the 2001 investigative team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for the series, "Gateway to Gridlock." Currently, she is the Sor Juana Writer-in-Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana.??Praise for Havana Noir: Miami Herald, 11/25/07Sewer-dwelling dwarves who run a black market. An engineer moonlighting as a beautician to make ends meet. Street toughs pondering existentialism. An aging aristocrat with an unsolvable dilemma. A Chinese boy bent on avenging his father's death.These are the characters you will meet in this remarkable collection, the latest edition of an original noir series featuring stories set in a distinct neighborhood of a particular city. Throughout these 18 stories, current and former residents of Havana -- some well-known, some previously undiscovered -- deliver gritty tales of depravation, depravity, heroic perseverance, revolution and longing in a city mythical and widely misunderstood.This is noir of a different shade and texture, shadowy and malevolent, to be sure, but desperate, too, heartbreakingly wounded, the stories linked more by the acrid pall of a failed but seemingly interminable experiment than by genre. Ambiguities abound, and ingenuity flourishes even as morality evaporates in the daily struggle for self-preservation.In this dark light the best of these stories are also the most disturbing. What For, This Burden by Michel Encinosa Fu, a resident of Havana, is a brutal and wrenching tale of brothers involved in drug deals and child prostitution; they peddle their own sister. The Red Bridge, by Yoss, another Havana resident, depicts a violent incident in the lives of two friends with apparently great potential who, though acutely aware of the depravity of their situation, are powerless or unwilling to extract themselves from the mean streets of El Patio.Cuban engineer Mariela Varona Roque's offering, The Orchid, is a short but powerful tale of the demise of a young boy frequently entrusted to the care of a browbeaten neighbor obsessed with his solitary orchid.Isolation, poverty and despair even in the midst of friends and family, lead to unthinkable cruelty, a common thread in these and other stories. But just as prevalent are resilience, hope, honor and ferocious devotion to the island. Pablo Mendina's Johnny Ventura's Seventh Try centers on the oft-repeated theme of getting to La Yuma, the United States. After six failures a man succeeds in building a boat sturdy enough to safely cross the Straits, only to find himself turning in circles in excruciating angst once out of the water.Alone in a decaying building overlooking the Malecon, a woman in Mylene Fernandez Pintado's The Scene sustains a semblance of quiet elegance for her dying mother. Then she's free but decides to stay on the island rather than join her brother in San Francisco. And in Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's beautifully rendered The Dinner, an elderly gentleman, his wife and a servant who hasn't been paid in 40 years agonize in their crumbling, once elegant mansion, over their inability to find the ingredients for an annual dinner for friends. With faint echoes of The Gift of the Magi and perfectly bridging the pre- and post-revolution days, the story is achingly splendid.Several murder stories, including one about an arrogant serial killer egged on by a woman he phones to brag about his exploits, and a film-noir style piece featuring a San Francisco private eye sent to bring out a thrill-seeking rich kid on the eve of the revolution, round out the collection and justify its place in the series.But if you're looking for slick, moody, detective noir, sunsets, mojitos at La Florida, or dancing girls at La Tropicana, you won't find them in Havana Noir. Along with grit and pluck and the disintegration of structure and values, there is an overarching sadness to these stories as evidenced by perhaps the most disturbing commonality: repeated loveless, disconnected sex, including rape and incest, but more often just mindless, pleasureless consensual copulation, all that's left to fill the time while waiting for something to change.South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 12/2/07The streets of Havana teem with a diverse, complex people whose wants and needs are often neglected but who are connected by one ideal: to have a good life.In this superb collection of short stories edited by novelist, poet and journalist Achy Obejas, myriad characters show just how far they will go for just a small part of the world and keep their dignity despite, as Obejas says, "the damage inured by self-preservation at all costs."There's the cross-eyed young man whose "affliction" prevents him from getting a job but who finds a kind of refuge with a black market-dealing dwarf. There's a Chinese boy trying to avenge his father. And there's the woman tethered to Cuba by her dying mother.The 18 stories by current and former residents of Havana are gritty, heartbreaking and capture the city. Each story an unflinching look at Havana, giving a sense of hope — and hopelessness — for what the city was and is now and could be again.Says Obejas in her introduction, "In the real Havana — the aphotic Havana that never appears in the postcards, tourist guides, or testimonies of either the political left or right — the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need inevitably turns the human heart feral."This is the kind of keen insight we've come to expect from the Noir anthologies published by Akashic. Each anthology features a different city, such as Baltimore, Miami, San Francisco and others, and acts as a mini-guide to each area. The compressed action, the layered plots and the character studies packed into just a few pages make short stories riveti

    McCauleySPILL SITE by Matthew C. FunkA CLEAN WHITE SUN by Mike WilkersonLUCK by Johnny ShawPLUS: an exclusive first look at Tyrus Books upcoming novel from Todd Robinson, THE HARD BOUNCE

    They were never seen again. The father of one of the boys has hired New York private eye Joe Dunne to find the men responsible and kill them.

    In 1946 New York, Ellen, a world-renowned musician, is suffering from the effects of her latest mental breakdown. Amongst other challenges, a chance meeting with a folk singer from her past causes her psychological well-being to rapidly deteriorate. Over the following terrifying weeks, Ellen finds herself becoming both a criminal and a victim as she attempts to contend with the darkness within.