Buenos Aires Noir


Book Description

Short stories featuring “crimes of passion, politics, and perversity,” set in this tumultuous South American city (Publishers Weekly). It is a city of contradictions and chaos; crude, transitory violence, the lack of law and order, the ubiquitously hurled insult, the thunderous boom of traffic, and honking curses. Its inhabitants love the city and hate it—from the multimillionaires of Puerto Madero to the workers in the “misery cities,” the poorest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Often the mansions are separated from the shanties by nothing but a single street or railroad track. These short stories of crime and corruption from a lineup of excellent authors highlights the relations between the social and economic classes—their tensions, their cruelties, and also their love—in a city that has reinvented itself many times over. Brand-new stories by Inés Garland, Inés Fernández Moreno, Ariel Magnus, Alejandro Parisi, Pablo De Santis, Verónica Abdala, Alejandro Soifer, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Ernesto Mallo, Enzo Maqueira, Elsa Osorio, Leandro Ávalos Blacha, Claudia Piñeiro, and María Inés Krimer. “As editor Mallo says, Buenos Aires is a city ‘in love with its own disorder’ . . . . Murder most foul, the star attraction of almost any good noir, makes several appearances here . . . .Mallo’s well-balanced collection gives readers a glimpse of both the geography of Buenos Aires and its heart.” —Kirkus Reviews




Argentina Noir


Book Description

An engaging and insightful guide to Argentine crime fiction since 2000. Argentina Noir offers a guide to Argentine crime fiction, with a focus on works published since the year 2000. It argues that the novela negra, or crime novel, has become the favored genre for many writers to address the social malaise brought about by changes linked to globalization and market-driven economic policies. Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz presents close readings and original interpretations of eleven novels, all set in or around Buenos Aires, and explores the ways these texts adapt major motifs, figures, and literary techniques in Hispanic crime fiction in order to give voice to wide-ranging social critiques. Schmidt-Cruz addresses such topics as organized crime and institutional complicity, corruption during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–1999), terrorist attacks on Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires and the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, and the winners and the losers of neoliberal structural changes. With a solid underpinning in sociological studies and criticism of the genre and its historical context, Argentina Noir reveals how these novels are renovating the genre to engage pressing issues confronting not only Argentina but also countries throughout Latin America and around the globe. “This is a very significant contribution to the field. It is a full and illustrative, as well as authoritative, guide to crime fiction and the novela negra in Argentina in the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on the literature’s social and political thematics.” — Philip Swanson, author of The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after the Boom




Barcelona Noir (Akashic Noir).


Book Description

Barcelona, with all its illustrious colour and exterior finery, hasn't always been able to curb its darker yearnings. Blame it on a bubbling, repressive concoction made with a pinch of Church, a touch of Crown and a large dose of General Franco to stir up the insides of its very independent and anarchic Catalonian spirit. Repression, vice, immigration - the 14 stories in Barcelona Noir will divert readers' eyes from Barcelona's lively Ramblas and Gaudi spires and open them to the city's tainted side; one that will never appear on any tour.




Buenos Aires Triad


Book Description

A searing portrait of small-time crooks and immigrant gangs in Argentina's capital... When an armed robber shoots a British tourist in Buenos Aires, Lucas's life changes forever. A humble watch-seller moonlighting for the gang behind the robbery, he wants to go straight but instead gets pulled into extortion work for the Xiezhi Triad.




Mexico City Noir


Book Description

Latin American noir at its finest. “[A] diverse collection of stories which reflect the harshness and also the brittle brilliance of life in Mexico City.”—MostlyFiction Book Reviews Akashic Books’s acclaimed series of original noir anthologies has set a high standard for portraying cities and their neighborhoods in all their dark and violent splendor. Now, “Mexico City Noir surpasses that standard with phantasmagorical tales of double-dealing, corruption, violence and self-delusion . . . This collection is such a varied literary feast. Fans of Jorge Luis Borges will find surprises galore in the story ‘Violeta Isn’t Here Anymore.’ The noir-ish maze that Myriam Laurini constructs with her flair for the shifting realities of ‘magical realism’ is dazzling enough, and then up pops Borges . . . “Peel back one layer and find something totally unexpected, these tales tell us again and again. As Eduardo Monteverde writes, ‘the heart of Mexico City is made of mud and green rocks, and the God of Rain continues to cry over the whole country.’ And standing on that ground, the 12 writers here find inspiration to die for” (Shelf Awareness). This anthology includes brand-new stories by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Eugenio Aguirre, Eduardo Antonio Parra, Bernardo Fernández Bef, Óscar de la Borbolla, Rolo Díez, Victor Luiz González, F.G. Haghenbeck, Juan Hernández Luna, Myriam Laurini, Eduardo Monteverde, and Julia Rodríguez.




Shantytown


Book Description

A middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires's shantytown attracts the attention of a corrupt policeman who would use anyone including innocent kids to break a drug ring he believes is operating in the slum. By the author of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.




Needle in a Haystack


Book Description

This is not simply a triumph of style; it is both a reflection on a time of bloodshed and a raw vision of human misery. Guillermo Saccomanno, winner of the Argentine National Literature Prize. This man knows. He knows about guns, knows about women...




Kingston Noir


Book Description

“Subverts the simplistic sunshine/reggae/spliff-smoking image of Jamaica at almost every turn . . . with a rich interplay of geographies and themes.” —Los Angeles Times From Trench Town to Half Way Tree to Norbrook to Portmore and beyond, the stories of Kingston Noir shine light into the darkest corners of this fabled city. Joining award-winning Jamaican authors such as Marlon James, Leone Ross, and Thomas Glave are two “special guest” writers with no Jamaican lineage: Nigerian-born Chris Abani and British writer Ian Thomson. The menacing tone that runs through some of these stories is counterbalanced by the clever humor in others, such as Kei Miller’s “White Gyal with a Camera,” who softens even the hardest of August Town’s gangsters; and Mr. Brown, the private investigator in Kwame Dawes’s story, who explains why his girth works to his advantage: “In Jamaica a woman like a big man. She can see he is prosperous, and that he can be in charge.” Together—with more contributions from Patricia Powell, Colin Channer, Marcia Douglas, and Christopher John Farley—the outstanding tales in Kingston Noir comprise the best volume of short fiction ever to arise from the literary wellspring that is Jamaica. “Thoroughly well-written stories . . . fans of noir will enjoy this batch of sordid tales set in the sweltering heat of the tropics.” —Publishers Weekly “An eclectic and gritty mélange of tales that sears the imagination . . . Kingston Noir proves its worth as a quintessential piece of West Indian literature—rich, artistic, timeless, and above all, draped in unmistakable realism.” —The Gleaner (Jamaica)




Vancouver Noir


Book Description

This “excellent anthology” of noir fiction set in Canada’s City of Glass features all-new stories by Linda L. Richards, Sam Wiebe, Yasuko Thanh and more (Quill & Quire, starred review). For many people, Vancouver is a city of affluence, athleisure, and craft beer. But if look a little closer at this gentrified paradise, you’ll find the old saying holds true: behind every fortune there’s a crime. Hidden beneath Vancouver’s gleaming glass skyscrapers are shadowy streets where poverty, drugs, and violence rule the day. These fourteen stories of crime and mayhem in the Pacific Northwest offer an entertaining “mix of wily pros, moody misfits, bewildered bystanders, and a touch of the supernatural” (Kirkus). Vancouver Noir features the Arthur Ellis Award-winning story “Terminal City” by Linda L. Richards, and the Arthur Ellis Award-finalist “Wonderful Life” by Sam Wiebe. It also includes entries by Timothy Taylor, Sheena Kamal, Robin Spano, Carleigh Baker, Dietrich Kalteis, Nathan Ripley, Yasuko Thanh, Kristi Charish, Don English, Nick Mamatas, S.G. Wong, and R.M. Greenaway.




Hades, Argentina


Book Description

VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD FINALIST CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLIST “A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” —Seattle Times A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love. In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both? It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.