I went back to the office, carrying the manuscript. Maybe there was something there I could use in my story. Something about impossible loves or the like. Readers like a bit of poetry with their bloodshed. I thought about Tadeu, the nobody, the mere woodsman, who one day finds himself the owner of the most beautiful woman in the world, who owes him her life but whom he must lock inside the house. I imagined how the break-in of the apartment by the butchers must have gone down. Perhaps they arrived in late afternoon, the time of long shadows. Perhaps Tadeu feared the time of long shadows every day, and what they could bring. Later I thought about what I would tell Mosquito.
“You were right, it did lead somewhere. It’s basically the story of Snow White. Minus the dwarfs.”
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Tony Bellotto is author of the best-selling Bellini mystery novels, which have been released as major feature films and translated widely, establishing him as the preeminent writer of Brazilian detective fiction. He is also a guitarist and songwriter for the famed Brazilian rock band Titãs (The Titans), which has released twenty albums and sold over six million albums. Bellotto also writes for the newspaper Globo and hosts a television show.
MV Bill (a.k.a. Alex Pereira Barbosa) is a rapper, writer, and activist. In 2005, with his coauthor Celso Athayde, he launched Cabeça de Porco. The following year he published a best-selling nonfiction work, Falcão: meninos do tráfico, which inspired a documentary. In collaboration with Celso Athayde, he created the NGO Unified Central of Favelas (CUFA). He is host of the programs Aglomerado on Brazilian TV and A voz das periferias and O som das ruas on FM radio in Rio.
Arnaldo Bloch, a journalist and writer, was born in 1965 in Rio, where he still resides. He began his career with the magazine Manchete and since 1993 has been a reporter for the newspaper O Globo, where he has a weekly column. He published the novels Amanhã a loucura and Talk Show and a biography of Fernando Sabino for the series Perfis do Rio. In 2008 he launched, through the publisher Companhia das Letras, the family saga Os irmãos Karamabloch.
Flávio Carneiro was born in Goiânia and lives in Rio. He writes short stories, essays, children’s fiction, and novels, in addition to a pair of film scripts. He wrote the Rio de Janeiro Trilogy, comprising the novels A Confissão, O Campeonato, and A Ilha. His stories and essays have been published in the US, Germany, France, Portugal, and Mexico, among other countries. In the crime genre his most recent novel is O livro roubado, set in Rio.
Arthur Dapieve was born in Rio in 1963. He is a journalist, writer, and professor at the Catholic University (PUC) in Rio. Since 1993 he has authored a weekly column on culture for the daily newspaper O Globo. He also worked for the Jornal do Brasil, the magazine Veja Rio, and the website NoPonto/NoMínimo. In addition to books of nonfiction, mostly about music, he has written the novels De cada amor tu herderás só o cinismo and Black Music.
Marcelo Ferroni was born in 1974 in São Paulo and lives in Rio with his wife and two children. Since the end of 2006 he has been editor of the Alfaguara imprint of Editora Objetiva. He is author of the novels Método pratico da guerrilha (winner of the São Paulo Literature Prize in the New Author category) and Das paredes, meu amor, os escravos nos contemplam.
Guilherme Fiuza is the author of various books, including Meu nome não é Johnny (adapted for the screen), Bussunda—A vida do casseta, and 3,000 dias no bunker. He is coauthor of the miniseries O brado retumbante on TV Globo (with Euclydes Marinho, Denise Bandeira, and Nelson Motta), which was nominated for an International Emmy in 2013. He is a columnist for the magazine Época and the newspaper O Globo.
Alexandre Fraga dos Santos was born in 1973 in Rio’s Tijuca district. He has worked as a federal police agent for eighteen years. He is author of the novels Oeste—A Guerra do Jogo do Bicho, Canibal de Copacabana, and Quadros de demônios vão ao confessionário. He roots for the Vasco soccer team and is the father of José Artur.
Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is a native of Rio de Janeiro with degrees in philosophy and psychology. A former professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), he left academic life after publishing eight books on philosophy and psychoanalysis and soon gained renown as a writer of crime fiction. He is the creator of Inspector Espinosa, protagonist of almost all his stories. His debut novel, The Silence of the Rain, won both the Jabuti and the Nestlé Literature prizes.
Clifford E. Landers, a preeminent translator from Brazilian Portuguese, has translated novels by Rubem Fonseca, Jorge Amado, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Patrícia Melo, and Paulo Coelho. He received the Mario Ferreira Award and a prose translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004. His Literary Translation: A Practical Guide was published by Multilingual Matters Ltd. in 2001. A professor emeritus at New Jersey City University, he now lives in Naples, Florida.
Adriana Lisboa, born in 1970 in Rio, is a novelist, poet, and short story writer. She is the author, among other works, of the novels Symphony in White (winner of the José Saramago Prize), Hut of Fallen Persimmons, Crow Blue (an Independent book of the year), and Hanói; and the poetry collection Parte da paisagem. Her books have been translated in seventeen countries. She is part of the board of directors of Denver-based NGO US–Brazil Connect, geared toward education.
Raphael Montes was born in 1990 in Rio. A lawyer and writer, he is considered by Scott Turow to be one of today’s most promising young contemporary fiction writers. Roulette, his first novel, was a finalist for two prestigious Brazilian literary prizes. Perfect Days, his second novel, has been phenomenally successful, was translated into numerous languages, and published in the United States by Penguin Random House. The Village, his third novel, has earned him comparisons to Stephen King.
Victoria Saramago was born in Rio in 1985, and is an assistant professor of Brazilian literature at the University of Chicago. Her publications include the critical study O duplo do pai: o filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza and the novel Renée esfacelada. Her career as a critic and fiction writer was chronicled in Julia de Simone’s documentary Romance de formação.
Luiz Eduardo Soares is a writer, anthropologist, and political scientist. With a postdoctorate in political philosophy, he occupied the positions of national Secretary of Public Safety (2003) and coordinator of Safety, Justice, and Citizenship for the State of Rio de Janeiro (1999–2000). He is currently a professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Among his published works are the best sellers Cabeça de Porco, with MV Bill and Celso Athayde, and Elite Squad.
Luis Fernando Verissimo was born in 1936 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he still resides. A columnist for the newspapers O Globo, O Estado de São Paulo, and Zero Hora, among others, he boasts a vast literary oeuvre that includes children’s books, humor, comics, and novels, published both in Brazil and abroad. Many of his works have been adapted to cinema, TV, and the theater. His Diálogos impossíveis won the Jabuti Prize for Best Book of the Year.
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 notio
n that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.
It may not have been appropriate, but 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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