ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
ROBERT MAILER ANDERSON was born in San Francisco in 1968. He finished his first novel, Boonville, in a hotel room in North Beach while jocking coffee at Caffe Trieste. He now lives with his wife and three children in Pacific Heights above a robot, and is a board member of SFJAZZ and the S.F. Opera Association.
WILL CHRISTOPHER BAER is the author of the Phineas Poe trilogy: Kiss Me, Judas, Penny Dreadful, and Hell’s Half Acre, to be released in omnibus edition fall 2005 by MacAdam/Cage. He lives in California. For more, see will-christopherbaer.com.
KATE BRAVERMAN first came to San Francisco as a runaway in 1965. She has written four novels (including Lithium for Medea and Palm Latitudes), four books of poetry, and two collections of short stories, mostly set in a California that doesn’t appear on the postcards. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships for both her fiction and nonfiction. Braverman currently lives in Russian Hill with her husband.
DAVID CORBETT was an operative for the San Francisco private investigation firm of Palladino & Sutherland for fifteen years. His first book, The Devil’s Redhead, was nominated for the Barry and Anthony Awards for Best First Novel of 2002, and his second, Done for a Dime, was nominated for the Macavity Award for Best Novel of 2003 and was named a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in dismay.
BARRY GIFFORD, a novelist (Wild at Heart, Wyoming), poet (Back in America), and screenwriter (Lost Highway, City of Ghosts) has resided in or around San Francisco for thirty-five years. “After Hours at La Chinita” is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Stars Above Veracruz. For more information please visit www.BarryGifford.com.
JON LONGHI is the author of five books: Bricks and Anchors, The Rise and Fall of Third Leg, Everyone at the Funeral Was Slam Dancing, Flashbacks and Premonitions, and Wake Up and Smell the Beer. He has been published in numerous anthologies and has performed his work throughout the United States in cafés, bookstores, libraries, and nightclubs. He lives in San Francisco.
ALVIN LU was born in San Francisco. He wrote the “City God” column for the San Francisco Bay Guardian for several years and is also the author of a novel, The Hell Screens, published by Four Walls Eight Windows.
PETER MARAVELIS has been a bookseller for over fifteen years. He is currently the events coordinator for City Lights Bookstore. He was born and raised in San Francisco where he currently lives.
EDDIE MULLER is a native San Franciscan and author of three popular studies of noir: Dark City, Dark City Dames, and The Art of Noir. He is a multiple Edgar and Anthony Award nominee, and the recipient of the Shamus Award for Best First Novel (The Distance). He is founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the rescue and preservation of “lost” and damaged noir films.
ALEJANDRO MURGUÍA is the author of Southern Front, a short story collection about the Chicano internationalists in Nicaragua, which received an American Book Award in 1991. This War Called Love, Nine Stories was also honored with an American Book Award in 2002. He is working on a new collection of short stories, Tropic Noir.
JIM NISBET has published eight novels and five volumes of poetry. His novels include The Gourmet (aka The Damned Don’t Die), Lethal Injection, Death Puppet, Prelude to a Scream, The Price of the Ticket, and his latest, The Syracuse Codex. He lives in San Francisco where he operates the design firm Electronics Furniture.
PETER PLATE is a self-taught fiction writer and former squatter in the Mission district of San Francisco. His books address the history and geography of inner-city life. His latest novel is Fogtown.
SIN SORACCO was born at St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission district of San Francisco. She makes up her life from whatever’s around—if there’s nothing handy, she goes somewhere else. The center remains steady: the intense visceral pleasure of stories. She says, “One day our stories will bring the bastards down.”
DOMENIC STANSBERRY is known for his dark, innovative crime novels, including his award-winning North Beach mysteries, The Last Days of Il Duce and Chasing the Dragon. Stansberry is also the author of The Confession, a “modern noir shocker” that has been hailed as the vanguard of the neo-pulp renaissance. He has been nominated three times for the Edgar Allan Poe Award.
DAVID HENRY STERRY is both writer of and performer in a one-man show based on his memoir Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent. His next book will be Putting Your Passion into Print. He has worked as a chicken, chicken fryer, a Hollywood screenwriter, a cherry picker, a sitcom actor, a poet, a stand-up comic (at Holy City Zoo, Cobb’s, and Sutro Bathhouse), a barker (at the Garden of Eden on Broadway in San Francisco), and a marriage counselor.
MICHELLE TEA is cofounder of the legendary all-girl spoken word road show known as Sister Spit. She has contributed to many fiction anthologies and written several acclaimed novels, the most recent of which was a collaboration with illustrator Laurenn McCubbin, titled Rent Girl. Her first collection of poetry, The Beautiful, was released in 2004 by Manic D Press and she curates a reading series called SF Radar at the San Francisco Main Library.
Also available from Akashic Books
BROOKLYN NOIR
edited by Tim McLoughlin
350 pages, a trade paperback original, $15.95, ISBN: 1-888451-58-0 *Finalist stories for EDGAR AWARD, PUSHCART PRIZE, and SHAMUSAWARD
Twenty brand new crime stories from New York’s punchiest borough. Contributors include: Pete Hamill, Arthur Nersesian, Maggie Estep, Nelson George, Neal Pollack, Sidney Offit, Ken Bruen, and others.
“Brooklyn Noir is such a stunningly perfect combination that you can’t believe you haven’t read an anthology like this before. But trust me—you haven’t. Story after story is a revelation, filled with the requisite sense of place, but also the perfect twists that crime stories demand. The writing is flat-out superb, filled with lines that will sing in your head for a long time to come.”
—Laura Lippman, winner of the Edgar, Agatha, and Shamus awards
BROOKLYN NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS
edited by Tim McLoughlin
309 pages, trade paperback, $15.95, ISBN: 1-888451-76-9
Brooklyn Noir is back with a vengeance, this time with masters of yore mixing with the young blood: H.P. Lovecraft, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Pete Hamill, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Irwin Shaw, Carolyn Wheat, Thomas Wolfe, Hubert Selby, Stanley Ellin, Gilbert Sorrentino, Maggie Estep, and Salvatore La Puma.
CHICAGO NOIR
edited by Neal Pollack
252 pages, a trade paperback original, $14.95, ISBN: 1-888451-89-0
Chicago Noir is populated by hired killers and jazzmen, drunks and dreamers, corrupt cops and ticket scalpers and junkies. It’s the Chicago that the Department of Tourism doesn’t want you to see, a place where hard cases face their sad fates, and pay for their sins in blood. This isn’t someone’s dream of Chicago. It’s not even a nightmare. It’s just the real city, unfiltered. Chicago Noir.
Brand new stories by: Neal Pollack, Achy Obejas, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Adam Langer, Joe Meno, Peter Orner, Kevin Guilfoile, Bayo Ojikutu, Jeff Allen, Luciano Guerriero, Claire Zulkey, Andrew Ervin, M.K. Meyers, Todd Dills, C.J. Sullivan, Daniel Buckman, Amy Sayre-Roberts, and Jim Arndorfer.
SOUTHLAND by Nina Revoyr
348 pages, a trade paperback original, $15.95, ISBN: 1-888451-41-6
*Winner of a LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD & FERRO-GRUMLEY
AWARD
*EDGAR AWARD finalist
“If Oprah still had her book club, this novel likely would be at the top of her list…With prose that is beautiful, precise, but never pretentious…”
—Booklist
“Southland merges elements of literature and social history with the propulsive drive of a mystery, while evoking Southern California as a character, a key player in the tale. Such aesthetics have motivated other Southland writers, most notably Walter Mosley.”
—Los Angeles Times
ADIOS MUCHACHOS by Daniel Chavarría
&n
bsp; 245 pages, a trade paperback original, $13.95, ISBN: 1-888451-16-5 *Winner of the EDGAR AWARD
“Out of the mystery wrapped in an enigma that, over the last forty years, has been Cuba for the U.S., comes a Uruguayan voice so cheerful, a face so laughing, and a mind so deviously optimistic that we can only hope this is but the beginning of a flood of Latin America’s indomitable novelists, playwrights, storytellers. Welcome, Daniel Chavarría.”
—Donald Westlake, author of Trust Me on This
HAIRSTYLES OF THE DAMNED
by Joe Meno
290 pages, a trade paperback original, $13.95, ISBN: 1-888451-70-X *PUNK PLANET BOOKS, a BARNES & NOBLE DISCOVER PROGRAM selection
“Joe Meno writes with the energy, honesty, and emotional impact of the best punk rock. From the opening sentence to the very last word, Hairstyles of the Damned held me in his grip.”
—Jim DeRogatis, pop music critic, Chicago Sun-Times
These books are available at local bookstores.
They can also be purchased with a credit card online through www.akashicbooks.com.
To order by mail send a check or money order to:
AKASHIC BOOKS
PO Box 1456, New York, NY 10009
www.akashicbooks.com, [email protected]
(Prices include shipping. Outside the U.S., add $8 to each book ordered.)
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART I: EDGE CITY
DOMENIC STANSBERRY
The Prison
DAVID CORBETT
It Can Happen
SIN SORACCO
Double Espresso
BARRY GIFFORD
After Hours at La Chinita
PART II: IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY
KATE BRAVERMAN
The Neutral Zone
ALVIN LU
Le Rouge et le Noir
MICHELLE TEA
Larry’s Place
ALEJANDRO MURGUÍA
The Other Barrio
PART III: NEO-NOIR
PETER PLATE
Genesis to Revelation
WILL CHRISTOPHER BAER
Deception of the Thrush
JIM NISBET
Weight Less Than Shadow
JON LONGHI
Fixed
PART IV: FLOWERS OF ROMANCE
ROBERT MAILER ANDERSON
Briley Boy
EDDIE MULLER
Kid’s Last Fight
DAVID HENRY STERRY
Confessions of a Sex Maniac
About the Contributors
San Francisco Noir Page 25