St. Petersburg Noir Format: Paperback

Following Akashic's success withMoscow Noir, this new volumes explore the dark beating heart of Russia's cultural mecca.

“The Russian soul is well suited to a style defined by dark, hard-edged moodiness in underground settings . . . For all sophisticated crime fiction readers.” ―Library Journal

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: Lena Eltang, Sergei Nosov, Alexander Kudriavstev, Andrei Kivinov, Julia Belomlinsky, Natalia Kurchatova, Ksenia Venglinskaya, Eugene Kogan, Anton Chizh, Vladimir Berezin, Andrei Rubanov, and others.

From the introduction by Julia Goumen & Natalia Smirnova:

“When you think of the most noir city in Russia, the name that springs to mind is St. Petersburg. This link between the place, its character, and the genre has become quite paradoxically the biggest challenge for the authors in this anthology, who must balance their work with the city’s rich noir tradition and at the same time transform daily criminal headlines into a literary experience. Indeed, the tradition of noir writing in St. Petersburg features the greatest names of Russian literature. Most obviously, one thinks of the nineteenth century: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, and Nikolai Gogol . . . The origins of this rich noir tradition come from the city’s history, its urban landscape, and even the weather, as Petersburg’s climate undoubtedly affects local character . . . St. Petersburg is famous for its canals, rivers, embankments, and bridges. This romantic landscape offers poetic comparisons to Venice in Italy, but also implies fluctuation, unsteadiness, fluidity that diffuses the local character and its morals . . . The city’s inescapable anguish will seize every reader, resonating to the maddening clopping sound of the Bronze Horseman.”

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.