We have chosen the same principle here, and the book's contents do a good job of covering the island, from C.J. Sullivan's Inwood and John Lutz's Upper West Side, to Justin Scott's Chelsea and Carol Lea Benjamin's Greenwich Village. The range in mood and literary style is at least as great; noir can be funny, it can stretch to include magic realism, it can be ample or stark, told in the past or present tense, and in the first or third person. I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it -- but it seems to be that it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.The good Samaritan / Charles Ardai --The last supper / Carol Lea Benjamin --If you can't stand the heat / Lawrence Block --Rain / Thomas H. Cook --A nice place to visit / Jeffrey Deaver --The next best thing / Jim Fusilli --Take the man's pay / Robert Knightly --The laundry room / John Lutz --Freddie Prinze is my guardian angel / Liz Martínez --The organ grinder / Maan Meyers --Why do they have to hit? / Martin Meyers --Building / S.J. Rozan --The most beautiful apartment in New York / Justin Scott --The last round / C.J. Sullivan --Crying with Audrey Hepburn / Xu Xi

    New Orleans has always had a heart of noir.Brand-new stories by: Thomas Adcock, Ace Atkins, Patty Friedmann, David Fulmer, Barbara Hambly, Greg Herren, Laura Lippman, Tim McLoughlin, James Nolan, Ted O'Brien, Eric Overmyer, Jeri Cain Rossi, Maureen Tan, Jervey Tervalon, Olympia Vernon, Christine Wiltz, Kalamu Ya Salaam, and Julie Smith, who also edited the collection.

    Unlike most claimants to that much-abused term, this is the real thing...The power of this collection comes from the voices of these authors, voices suffused with rage ("3 Block From Hell," by Bryan K. Palmer), despair ("There Will Be Seeds for Next Year," by Zeke Caligiuri), and madness ("Shuffle," by Christopher M. Stephen)."-- New York Times Book Review "These are stories that resonate with authenticity and verve and pain and truth. Any collection edited by the National Book Award-winning author Oates (them; Blonde, Rape: A Love Story) deserves attention, but the contributors are deft and confident, and great writers without her imprimatur....Authentic, powerful, visceral, moving, great writing."-- Library Journal , Starred review"A remarkable anthology of stories written by inmates of correctional institutions across America...Most importantly, this landmark volume amplifies the voices of the incarcerated."-- Publishers Weekly , Starred reviewOne of BookRiot's Must-Read Books from Indie Presses for 2014"I gobbled it up. The voice in each piece is authentic...A fascinating read."-- subTerrain Magazine "A strong compilation of prison literature, varied, well-written and not always what might be expected."--Reviewing the Evidence"No matter what side of the bars you live on, Prison Noir is worth doing time with."-- Killeen Daily Herald "Readers will soak up every line...There is no doubt that readers from all walks of life, especially those less knowledgeable about life in prison, will appreciate Prison Noir."--Killer Nashville"This is a collection of stories that you will want to take your time with, savor, and probably reread a few times."--Jenn's Review Blog"There is an intensity and melancholy that shines through these fifteen short stories, all written by prison inmates incarcerated throughout the US, and edited by the inestimable Joyce Carol Oates."--A Lit Chick"Affecting, powerfully written and arresting literature. Well worth seeking out."--BRSBKBLOGAkashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective geographic range of the book. This anthology, with stories set in different prisons across the US, presents an absolutely new perspective on prison literature.From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:"The blood jet is poetry--these words of Sylvia Plath have reverberated through my experience of reading and rereading the stories of Prison Noir. In this case the blood jet is prose, though sometimes poetic prose; if we go a little deeper, in some chilling instances, the blood jet is exactly that: blood. For these stories are not "literary" exercises--though some are exceptionally well-written by any formalist standards, and artfully structured as narratives; with a single exception the stories are stark, somber, emotionally driven cris de coeur...We may feel revulsion for some of the acts described in these stories, but we are likely to feel a startled, even stunned sympathy for the perpetrators. And in several stories, including even murderers' confessions, we are likely to feel a profound and unsettling identification...There is no need for fantasy-horror in a place in which matter-of-fact horror is the norm, and mental illness is epidemic. Vividly rendered realism is the predominant literary strategy, as in a riveting documentary film."Featuring brand-new stories by: Christopher M. Stephen, Sin Soracco, Scott Gutches, Eric Boyd, Ali F. Sareini, Stephen Geez, B.M. Dolarman, Zeke Caligiuri, Marco Verdoni, Kenneth R. Brydon, Linda Michelle Marquardt, Andre White, Timothy Pauley, Bryan K. Palmer, and William Van Poyck.

    Brooklyn Noir moves from Coney Island to Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bay Ridge to Red Hook to Bushwick to Sheepshead Bay to Park Slope and far deeper, into the heart of Brooklyn's historical and criminal largesse, with all of its dark splendor. Each contributor presents a brand new story set in a distinct neighborhood.Brooklyn Noir mixes masters of the mystery genre with the best of New York's literary fiction community-and, of course, leaves room for new blood. These brilliant and chilling stories see crime striking in communities of Russians, Jamaicans, Hasidic Jews, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Irish and many other ethnicities-in the most diverse urban location on the planet.Contributors include Pete Hamill, Nelson George, Sidney Offit, Arthur Nersesian, Pearl Abraham, Ellen Miller, Maggie Estep, Adam Mansbach, CJ Sullivan, Chris Niles, Norman Kelley, and many others.Akashic Books announces Brooklyn novelist Tim McLoughlin as the editor of the anthology (in addition to his contributing a story). McLoughlin's respect on any Brooklyn street predates the publication of his debut novel Heart of the Old Country (Akashic, 2001), a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program that was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "an inspired cross between Richard Price and Ross McDonald." For years, McLoughlin has worked in the Kings County Supreme Court in downtown Brooklyn.

    She is the author of five novels, including A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries and the memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me. She teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and in the Wilkes University low-residency MFA program in professional writing.

    His father runs a methodically organized meth ring, with local authorities on the dime to turn a blind eye to his dealings. Having dropped out of high school and cut himself off from his peers, Jacob has been working for this father for years, all on the promise that his payday will come eventually. The only joy he finds comes from reuniting with Maggie, his first love, and a girl clearly bound for bigger and better things than their hardscrabble town.Jacob has always been resigned to play the cards that were dealt him, but when a fatal mistake changes everything, he’s faced with a choice: stay and appease his father, or leave the mountains with the girl he loves. In a place where blood is thicker than water and hope takes a back seat to fate, Jacob wonders if he can muster the strength to rise above the only life he’s ever known.A Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel In the country-noir tradition of Winter's Bone meets 'Breaking Bad,' a savage and beautiful story of a young man seeking redemption.

    His sentence now up, Russell believes his debt has been paid. But when he returns home, he discovers that revenge lives and breathes all around him.Meanwhile, a woman named Maben and her young daughter trudge along the side of the interstate. Desperate and exhausted, the pair spend their last dollar on a room for the night, a night that ends with Maben holding a pistol and a dead deputy sprawled in the middle of the road.With the dawn, destinies collide, and Russell is forced to decide whose life he will save—his own or those of the woman and child.

    Nestled in a beautiful hollow of the Appalachians, his is a tight-knit community rife with secrets and suspicious of outsiders.Becky, a park ranger, arrives in this remote patch of North Carolina hoping to ease the anguish of a harrowing past. Searching for tranquility amid the verdant stillness, she finds solace in poetry and the splendor of the land. A vicious crime will plunge both sheriff and ranger into deep and murky waters, forging an unexpected bond between them. Caught in a vortex of duplicity, lies, and betrayal, they must navigate the dangerous currents of a tragedy that turns neighbor against neighbor—and threatens to sweep them all over the edge.

    As rains swell the Mississippi, the mighty river threatens to burst its banks and engulf everything in its path, including federal revenue agent Ted Ingersoll and his partner, Ham Johnson. Arriving in the tiny hamlet of Hobnob, Mississippi, to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents who’d been on the trail of a local bootlegger, they are astonished to find a baby boy abandoned in the middle of a crime scene.Ingersoll, an orphan raised by nuns, is determined to find the infant a home, and his search leads him to Dixie Clay Holliver. A strong woman married too young to a philandering charmer, Dixie Clay has lost a child to illness and is powerless to resist this second chance at motherhood. From the moment they meet, Ingersoll and Dixie Clay are drawn to each other. He has no idea that she's the best bootlegger in the county and may be connected to the agents’ disappearance. And while he seems kind and gentle, Dixie Clay knows full well that he is an enemy who can never be trusted.When Ingersoll learns that a saboteur might be among them, planning a catastrophe along the river that would wreak havoc in Hobnob, he knows that he and Dixie Clay will face challenges and choices that they will be fortunate to survive. Written with extraordinary insight and tenderness, The Tilted World is that rarest of creations, a story of seemingly ordinary people who find hope and deliverance where they least expect it—in each other.

    Desperation - both material and psychological - motivates his characters. A husband cruelly avenges the killing of his wife's pet; an injured rapist is cared for by a young girl, until she reaches her breaking point; a disturbed veteran of Iraq is murdered for his erratic behavior; an outsider's house is set on fire by an angry neighbor. There is also the tenderness and loyalty of the vulnerable in these stories - between spouses, parents and children, siblings, and comrades in arms - which brings the troubled, sorely tested cast of characters to vivid, relatable life.

    This is not an anthology of ill-conceived and inauthentic political thrillers. Instead, in D.C. Noir, pimps, whores, gangsters, and con-men run rampant in zones of this city that most never hear about.

    [It] will satisfy those with a hankering for a taste of the dark side."-- Publishers Weekly "A book full of cries in the dark, heavy drinking in the thin gray light of winter, and other dark poses. In other words, the stories sneak in the back screen door of those summer cottages after Labor Day, after all the tourists have gone home and Cape Codders of the authors' imagination drop their masks and their guards. It's a fun read, a little like tracing the shoreline of a not-quite-familiar coast."-- Boston Globe "David L. Ulin has put together a malicious collection of short stories that will stay with you long after you return home safe."-- The Cult: The Official Chuck Palahniuk Website Includes brand-new stories by Paul Tremblay, Seth Greenland, Ben Greenman, Fred G. Leebron, David L. Ulin, Dana Cameron, Kaylie Jones, and others.Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin has been vacationing in Cape Cod every summer since he was a boy. He knows the terrain inside and out; enough to identify the squalid underbelly of this allegedly idyllic location. His editing prowess is a perfect match for this fine volume.David L. Ulin is book critic of the Los Angeles Times. From 2005 to 2010, he was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and is the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

    Erickson, William Kent Krueger, Ellen Hart, Brad Zeller, Mary Sharratt, Pete Hautman, Larry Millett, Quinton Skinner, Gary Bush, and Chris Everheart.Julie Schaper has been a Twin Cities resident for 11 years. She lives with her husband and two dogs in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul. Steven Horwitz has worked in publishing for 25 years. He lives with his wife and two dogs in St. Paul.

    RozanLost and found by Thomas BentilLook what love is doing to me by Marlon JamesHome sweet home by Sandra KittA visit to St. Nick's by Robert J. HughesNumbers up by Miles Marshall LewisThe big five by Joseph WallaceErnie K.'s gelding by Ed DeeThe prince of Arthur Avenue by Patrick W. PicciarelliYou want I should whack Monkey Boy? by Thomas Adcock

    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