Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic Noir) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1617751375 ISBN 13: 9781617751370

Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd., 2012

Synopsis

Dennis Lehane returns to coedit, with Cotton & Clarke, the sequel to the best-selling evergreen anthology Boston Noir, culling classic stories from the city’s dark literary legacy.

“The contributor list is delightfully quirky . . . The collection’s unifying element is a deep understanding of Boston’s Byzantine worlds of race and class―as seen terrifyingly in Andre Dubus’s tale of mill town resentment and pampered preppies.” ―Boston Globe

Featuring stories by: Linda Barnes, Jason Brown, Andre Dubus, Chuck Hogan, George Harrar, George V. Higgins, Dennis Lehane, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert B. Parker, David Ryan, Kenneth Abel, Barbara Neely, Hannah Tinti, and David Foster Wallace.

From the introduction by Jaime Clarke, Mary Cotton, & Dennis Lehane:

 “What is noir and what is not inhabits a gray area. Its definition is continually expanding from the previous generation’s agreed-upon notion that noir involves men in fedoras smoking cigarettes on street corners. Noir alludes to crime, sure, but it also evokes bleak elements, danger, tragedy, sleaze, all of which is best represented by its root French definition: black. We used this idea as our guide for this sequel to the best-selling Boston Noir anthology . . .

"The commonwealth is an endless source of fascinating landscapes: the autumnal light spreading across the Charles River; the ice floes in the wintry Boston Harbor; a spring air tantalizing leaves in Harvard Yard; the salty taste of summer as sunbathers peer into the horizon, shielding their eyes from the glare, squinting into the middle distance. Beyond the postcard fabric, though, lies a community populated by broken families, criminal minds, voyeurs, and outsiders. They look like you and me. These are their stories.”

About this title

About the Author

Dennis Lehane is the author of the Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro mystery series (A Drink Before the War; Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone Baby Gone; Prayers for Rain, and Moonlight Mile), as well as Coronado (five stories and a play) and the award-winning novels Mystic River, Shutter Island, and The Given Day. Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Gone Baby Gone have been made into award-winning films. In 2009, he edited the best-selling anthology Boston Noir for Akashic Books.

Mary Cotton is the pseudonymous author of nine novels for young adults, six of them New York Times bestsellers. She is also a fiction editor for the literary magazine, Post Road, and is coeditor of No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road. She is coowner of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.

Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels We're So Famous, Vernon Downs, World Gone Water and Garden Lakes; the editor of the anthologies Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine (with Mary Cotton) and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.

Edition details

• Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1617751375
• ISBN 13: 9781617751370
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 250
• Editor: Lehane Dennis, Clarke Jaime, Cotton Mary