New Haven Noir - Paperback

by Amy Bloom (Editor)

"[It's] a kick to see Elm City haunts and issues weaved into short stories of intrigue by writers who know the turf." --New Haven Register

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Amy Bloom masterfully curates a star-studded cast of contributors, including Michael Cunningham, Stephen L. Carter, and Roxana Robinson, to portray the city's underbelly.

Brand-new stories by: Michael Cunningham, Roxana Robinson, Stephen L. Carter, John Crowley, Amy Bloom, Alice Mattison, Chris Knopf, Jonathan Stone, Sarah Pemberton Strong, Karen E. Olson, Jessica Speart, Chandra Prasad, David Rich, Lisa D. Gray, and Hirsh Sawhney.

From editor Amy Bloom:

"New Haven may be a noir town but, even though noir usually manages not to, we have heart. The chance to bring together some of my favorite writers, in my adopted hometown (in every place I bartended, the cook or the manager carried a .38 in his waistband, and I can still make ten kinds of boilermakers), was a joy and a privilege. Every single story is a noir gem . . . If you are an optimist, noir may be an antidote, a crisp, dry balance for your sunny outlook. If you are a pessimist (or, as we say, a realist), noir is your home ground, your tribe. It's not just that you expect ant to come to the picnic; you know damned well that there will be ants at the picnic. When they come, you're relieved. When they crawl up your brother's leg, you're reassured and possibly delighted. But the other side of noir is the moral center. Te center may be shabby, frayed, and in serious need of a facelift, but it is a center. It's not necessarily heroic. It's likely to be cynical, and its resilience is not the showy kind. Mean streets, as Raymond Chandler once said, but not mean.

That's New Haven."

Author Biography

Amy Bloom is the author of three novels, three collections of short stories, a children's book and a collection of essays. She has been a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Tin House and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award for Fiction. Her best-selling novel, Away, was an epic story about a Russian immigrant. Her most recent and best-selling novel, Lucky Us, came out in 2014. She lives in Connecticut and taught at Yale University for the last decade. She is now Wesleyan University's Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing.