Moscow Noir

Moscow has been chomping at the bit to enter the Noir Series . . . This anthology fearlessly investigates the darkest recesses of this fabled and troubled metropolis.

“As literary agents Smirnova and Goumen note in their introduction to this excellent entry in Akashic’s noir series, ‘A noir tradition does not yet really exist in Russia.’ Still, they have managed to find 14 authors whose dark take on humanity would be familiar to the likes of Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson.” ―Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Alexander Anuchkin, Igor Zotov, Gleb Shulpyakov, Vladimir Tuchkov, Anna Starobinets, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, Sergei Samsonov, Alexei Evdokimov, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Maxim Maximov, Irina Denezhkina, Dmitry Kosyrev, Andrei Khusnutdinov, and Sergei Kuznetsov.

From the introduction by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen:

“The center of a sprawling state for nearly its entire history, Moscow has attracted diverse communities, who have come to the city in search of better lives―to work, mainly, but also to beg, to glean scraps from the tables of hard-nosed merchants, to steal and rob. The concentration of capital allowed people to tear down and rebuild ad infinitum; new structures were erected literally on the foundations of the old. Before the 1917 Revolution, buildings demolished and resurrected many times over created a favorable environment for all manner of criminal and quasi-criminal elements. After the Revolution, the ideology did not simply encourage destruction but demanded it. The Bolshevik anthem has long defined the public mentality: ‘We will raze this world of violence to its foundations, and then/We will build our new world: he who was nothing will become everything! . . .”

NATALIA SMIRNOVA was born in 1978 in Moscow. In 2006, she cofounded the Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency with Julia Goumen, representing Russian authors worldwide. She and Goumen coedited both Moscow Noir and St. Petersburg Noir.

JULIA GOUMEN was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1977, and has a PhD in English. She has been working in publishing since 2001, and cofounded the Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency with Natalia Smirnova, with whom she coedited Moscow Noir and St. Petersburg Noir.