ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Kim Addonizio, an acclaimed writer of poetry and prose, is a Pushcart Prize winner, a National Book Award finalist for Tell Me, and a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her works include Jimmy & Rita, What Is This Thing Called Love, Lucifer at the Starlite, Little Beauties, My Dreams Out in the Street, and The Palace of Illusions. Her new books are a collection of poems, Mortal Trash, and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress.
Carolyn Alexander is a writer, storyteller, English teacher, and librarian. She revels in the use of the English language, and has written original material for single and tag-team storytelling performances as well as for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. She has a BA in English from Cornell University and a master’s in library science from Columbia University.
Phil Canalin is a twenty-five-year public health finance manager in Oakland, most recently for the noted Health Care for the Homeless program. He loves writing fiction, poetry, and children’s stories, and currently resides in Alameda with Sue, his wife of thirty-six years. His latest publication is Invisible Society Fables, short stories based on his experience with homeless people and their caregivers. For more information visit www.philcanalin.com.
Jamie DeWolf is a performer, film director, and showman from Oakland. He is a National Slam Poetry Champion, NPR’s “Performer of the Year,” and has toured everywhere from Moscow to San Quentin State Prison. DeWolf is the writer and codirector of the feature film Smoked, and the host and creator of Tourettes without Regrets, the longest-running monthly underground variety show in Oakland. Watch his films and performances at www.jamiedewolf.com.
Katie Gilmartin’s checkered past includes stints as a union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and college professor. She now teaches printmaking classes and runs the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging relationships between queer artists and their ancestors. Her illustrated noir, Blackmail, My Love, is set in San Francisco in the dark ages of queerdom: 1951. Winner of Lambda and Indiefab Gold awards, the narrative is a revelatory history of San Francisco’s sexually complex underground.
Judy Juanita’s debut novel, Virgin Soul, follows a black teen who becomes a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. Her short stories and poems have appeared widely and her plays have been produced in Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and New York City. De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland traces her development as a writer, activist, and independent woman.
Dorothy Lazard manages the Oakland History Room, a special reference collection in the Oakland Public Library. She holds a master’s degree in library and information studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Baltimore. Her writing has appeared in The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson, Essence magazine, and the librarian blog The Desk Set.
Joe Loya is the author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber, and is the host of The Allure of Crime podcast. He homeschools his daughter, but has not initiated her in the art of banditry. Yet.
Thomas McElravey was born in Tahoe City, California, in 1991. He moved to the Bay Area in 2009 to pursue writing and music. He has contributed to several local zines, all of which have disappeared into the region’s remarkable creative commons. His contribution to this collection, “Black and Borax,” is his first published short story. He currently lives in Oakland with his two cats, Serenity and Ichibad.
Eddie Muller, a.k.a. the “Czar of Noir,” is a writer, cinema historian, and film preservationist. He has been nominated for several Edgar and Anthony awards, and his novel The Distance won a Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel; Muller is also the coauthor of the New York Times best-selling autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star. He produces San Francisco’s Noir City, the largest annual film noir retrospective in the world, and is a regular host on Turner Classic Movies.
Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the International Dublin IMPAC Award. It won the Commonwealth Prize for Asia and was short-listed for the Northern California Book Award. The New York Times called the novel “incandescent.” Her second novel, What Lies Between Us, was picked as one of Buzzfeed’s twenty-seven most exciting new books of 2016. She lives in the Temescal area of Oakland.
Keenan Norris’s novel Brother and the Dancer won the James D. Houston Award in 2012. His work has appeared in Popmatters, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Inlandia: A Literary Journal, and the anthology Post-Soul Satire. Keenan edited Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape and is a guest editor for the Oxford African American Studies Center. He teaches at Evergreen Valley College and Goddard College’s West Coast campus and serves on the editorial board for the Los Angeles literary collective Literature for Life.
Nick Petrulakis has been a bookseller in the Bay Area for almost twenty years. His writing has appeared in various publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland magazine. His cocktail creations, marrying fiction and spirits, can be found at drinkswithnick.com.
Mahmud Rahman’s walk around Lake Merritt during a vacation compelled a move across the continent. Besides Oakland, his long-term hometowns have included Detroit and Dhaka. He currently works in Oakland and received an MFA in creative writing from Mills College. He is the author of the short story collection Killing the Water and the translator of Bangladeshi writer Mahmudul Haque’s novel Black Ice.
Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder is a visual artist and writer based in Oakland. A fan of all things odd, experimental, or transgressive, Schroeder creates artist books and dark short fiction. After earning an MFA in book art and creative writing from Mills College in 2015, Schroeder now works for Flying Fish Press, an independent publisher of limited-edition artists’ books, and teaches book art workshops and classes.
Jerry Thompson is an accomplished violinist, playwright, and poet. His works have appeared in Zyzzyva, James White Review, and Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing. He is the coauthor of Black Artists in Oakland. Thompson owned Black Spring Books, an independent bookstore, and is the creator and organizer of the original Sister Circle Reading Series. He is currently working on a play about the prison system, a memoir, and a poetry collection.
Harry Louis Williams II was born in New York City and raised in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He is an ordained Baptist minister who is known for writing gangster fiction such as the award-winning best seller Straight Outta East Oakland. In 2015, the Oakland city council recognized Williams for his work reclaiming the lives of young people lost to the streets. Dr. Cornel West calls his book Street Cred: A Hood Minister’s Guide to Urban Ministry a “must read.”
BONUS MATERIAL
Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series
Also available in the Akashic Noir Series
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
INTRODUCTION
WRITERS ON THE RUN
From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple
In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.
It may not have been appropriate, b
ut it sure was noir.
From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.
My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.
Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.
Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Girls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.
The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.
In 2003, inspired by Brooklyn’s unique and glorious mix of cultures, Tim and I set out to explore New York City’s largest borough in book form, in a way that would ring true to local residents. Tim loves his home borough despite its flagrant flaws, and was easily seduced by the concept of working with Akashic to try and portray its full human breadth.
He first proposed a series of books, each one set in a different neighborhood, whether it be Bay Ridge, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, or Canarsie. It was an exciting idea, but it’s hard enough to publish a single book, let alone commit to a full series. After we considered various other possibilities, Tim came upon the idea of a fiction anthology organized by neighborhood, each one represented by a different author. We were looking for stylistic diversity, so we focused on “noir,” and defined it in the broadest sense: we wanted stories of tragic, soulful struggle against all odds, characters slipping, no redemption in sight.
Conventional wisdom dictates that literary anthologies don’t sell well, but this idea was too good to resist—it seemed the perfect form for exploring the whole borough, and we got to work soliciting stories. We batted around book titles, including Under the Hood, before settling on Brooklyn Noir. The volume came together beautifully and was a surprise hit for Akashic, quickly selling through multiple printings and winning awards. (See pages 548–550 for a full list of prizes garnered by stories originally published in the Noir Series.)
Having seen nearly every American city, large and small, through the windows of a van or tour bus, I have developed a deep fondness for their idiosyncrasies. So for me it was easy logic to take the model of Brooklyn Noir—sketching out dark urban corners through neighborhood-based short fiction—and extend it to other cities. Soon came Chicago Noir, San Francisco Noir, and London Noir (our first of many overseas locations). Selecting the right editor to curate each book has been the most important decision we make before assembling it. It’s a welcome challenge because writers are often enamored of their hometowns, and many are seduced by the urban landscape’s rough edges. The generous support of literary superheroes like George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom have edited series volumes, has been critical.
There are now fifty-nine books in the Noir Series. Forty of them are from American locales. As of this writing, a total of 787 authors have contributed 917 stories to the series and helped Akashic to stay afloat during perilous economic times. By publishing six to eight new volumes in the Noir Series every year, we have provided a steady venue for short stories, which have in recent times struggled with diminishing popularity. Akashic’s commitment to the short story has been rewarded by the many authors—of both great stature and great obscurity—who have allowed us to publish their work in the series for a nominal fee.
I am particularly indebted to all sixty-seven editors who have cumulatively upheld a high editorial standard across the series. The series would never have gotten this far without rigorous quality control. There also couldn’t be a Noir Series without my devoted and tireless (if occasionally irreverent) staff led by Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, and Aaron Petrovich.
* * *
This volume serves up a top-shelf selection of stories from the series set in the United States. USA Noir only scratches the surface, however, and every single volume has more gems on offer.
When I set out to compile USA Noir, I was delighted by the immediate positive responses from nearly every author I contacted. The only author on my initial invitation list who isn’t included here is one I couldn’t track down: the publisher explained to me that the writer was “literally on the run.” While I’m disappointed that we can’t include the story, the circumstance is true to the Noir Series spirit.
And part of me—the noir part—is expecting a phone call from the writer, inviting me over for a smoke.
Johnny Temple
Brooklyn, NY
July 2013
___________________
More about USA Noir
The best USA-based stories in the Akashic Noir Series, compiled into one volume and edited by Johnny Temple!
“All the heavy hitters . . . came out for USA Noir . . . an important anthology of stories shrewdly culled by Johnny Temple.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
“Readers will be hard put to find a better collection of short stories in any genre.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A must read for mystery fans, not just devotees of Akashic’s ‘Noir’ series, this anthology serves as both an introduction for newcomers and a greatest-hits package for regular readers of the series . . . There isn’t a weak story in the collection . . . Strongly recommended for readers who enjoy mysteries published by Hard Case Crime, as well as for fans of police procedurals.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“The 37 stories in this collection represent the best of the U.S.-based anthologies, and the list of contributors include virtually anyone who’s made the best-seller list with a work of crime fiction in the last decade . . . a must-have anthology.” —Booklist (starred review)
“It’s hard to imagine how the present anthology could be topped for sheer marquee appeal . . . Perhaps the single most impressive feature of the collection is its range of voices, from Joyce Carol Oates’ faux innocent young family to Megan Abbott’s impressionable high school kids to the chorus of peremptory voices S.J. Rozan plants in a haunted thief’s head. Eat your heart out, Walt Whitman: These are the folks who hear America singing, and moaning and screaming.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A less enlightened Temple cover collection of crime and mystery stories could easily reduce itself to stereotypical cartoons about white detectives with a whiskey bottle and a gun in the drawer but Akashic’s series takes itself very seriously in its mission to represent all aspects of a city’s dark side.” —Kirkus Reviews, Feature Story/Interview with Johnny Temple
“For those who prefer their crime closer to home, there is USA Noir, a veritable greatest hits of Akashic’s long-running, acclaimed noir anthology series, rounding up solid gold blackness of the bleakest and darkest kind . . . Like Chuck Berry sang, ‘Anything you want, we got right here in the USA.’” —Mystery Scene Magazine
Launched with the summer ’04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books has published over sixty volumes in its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Featuring Noir Series stories from: Dennis Lehane, Don Winslow, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Susan Straight, Jonathan Safran Foer, Laura Lippman, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Child, T. Jefferson Parker, Lawrence Block, Terrance Hayes, Jerome Charyn, Jeffery Deaver, Maggie Estep, Bayo Ojikutu, Tim McLoughlin, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Reed Farrel Coleman, Megan Abbott, Elyssa East, James W. Hall, J. Malcolm Garcia, Julie Smith, Joseph Bruchac, Pir Rothenberg, Luis Alberto Urrea, Domenic Stansberry, John O’Brien, S.J. Rozan, Asali Solomon, William Kent Krueger, Tim Broderick, Bharti Kirchner, Karen Karbo, and Lisa Sandlin.
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