by Ivan Srsen
“Yes, I’ll liberate you,” I agreed, and washed the grains of sand from her face. “And you’ll be beautiful again and dance like a ballerina.”
“I will.” Her eyes shone. “And you’ll liberate me again.”
“That’s right. And then I’ll liberate you again.”
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
STEPHEN M. DICKEY (translator) is an associate professor in the Slavic Department at the University of Kansas. He has translated Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian fiction, including Meša Selimović’s Death and the Dervish, Borislav Pekić’s How to Quiet a Vampire, Miljenko Jergović’s Ruta Tannenbaum, and the poetry of Damir Šodan. Most recently, he translated Miljenko Jergović’s The Walnut Mansion for Yale University Press.
ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC (translator) has been translating work by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian authors since the 1980s, including writing by David Albahari, Neda Miranda Blažević-Krietzman, Daša Drndić, Antun Šoljan, and Dubravka Ugrešić. ALTA’s National Translation Award was given to her translation of Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer in 2006. She is a recipient of an NEA translation grant, and was a fellow at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in 2011.
WILL FIRTH (translator) was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has been living in Berlin, Germany, where he works as a freelance translator. He translates from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croat. For more information, visit www.willfirth.de.
NADA GAŠIĆ was born in 1950 in Maribor, and has lived in Zagreb since 1952. She translated The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk from Czech. She writes novels that are on the borderline between crime fiction, noir, and social writing. Mirna ulica, drvored (Quiet Street, Trees) and Voda, paučina (Water, Web) have received several prizes and have been translated into Ukrainian and Macedonian. She is currently working on the novel Četiri plamena, led (Four Flames, Ice).
RUŽICA GAŠPEROV was born in Split and currently lives there. Her stories have been published in magazines, anthologies, and on the web in Croatia and abroad. She was short-listed for the VBZ Award in 2011 for novel of the year. The Bjelovar Theater staged her play Adio pameti (Goodbye Reason) which was published on the website Drama.hr.
TATJANA JAMBRIŠAK (translator) was born in Zagreb in 1965. She is an award-winning literary translator and writer. Her translations include authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Elizabeth Strout, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, and Neil Gaiman, as well as Croatian comics and literature published abroad in English. She is an author of ten volumes of poetry, short fiction, and travelogues.
PERO KVESIĆ was born in Zagreb in 1950. For half of his working life he worked as a journalist, for a quarter of his working life he was unemployed, and for another quarter his status as a writer was officially recognized. More than twenty adult and children’s books of his have been published. In recent years he has mostly been writing for blogs.
DARKO MACAN was born in Zagreb in 1966. He is best known for writing comics he scripted ranging from Star Wars and Captain America to the Eisner-nominated Grendel Tales. His Croatian creations include the comic strip Borovnica and the young adult horror series Neruševac. He has recently completed the series of graphic novels Nous, les mort for Delcourt.
DARKO MILOŠIĆ was born in Zagreb in 1967. He earned a degree in literature at the Faculty of Philosophy. He is a translator from English, and the author of two books: Fifty-Five Easy Pieces and New Easy Pieces.
JOSIP NOVAKOVICH emigrated from Croatia to the United States at the age of twenty, and recently to Canada at the age of fifty-three. He has published a novel, April Fool’s Day, a novella, Three Deaths, three story collections, three narrative essay collections, and two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop. He has received a Whiting Award and in 2013 he was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.
ROBERT PERISIC was born in Split in 1969. He has written six books that have been published in translation in a number of European countries and the United States; he has received awards in Croatia and abroad. His novel Our Man in Iraq has been well received in the United States and was included on a list of notable translations and books of the year in 2013. He recently published a new novel, No Signal Area, and currently works in Zagreb as a freelance writer.
CORAL PETKOVICH (translator) was born in Subiaco, Western Australia. She lived in Croatia with her family from 1966–1989. She has translated poetry, short stories, and two published books—Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdic and Ivica Osim by Marko Tomas. She is also the author of two books, Ivan, from Adriatic to Pacific and May’s Story, and several short stories.
ZORAN PILIĆ was born in Zagreb. He writes on paraliterary themes for the website booksa.hr. His short stories and excerpts of his novels have been translated into English, German, and Spanish. He is the author of the short story collections Doggiestyle and Nema slonova u Meksiku (There Are No Elephants in Mexico); the novels Krimskrams and Đavli od papira (Paper Demons); and the poetry collection Dendermonde.
MIMA SIMIĆ is a writer, translator, and first guitar in the family band Drvena Marija (Wooden Maria). She is the author of the cult story collection Pustolovine Glorije Scott (Adventures of Gloria Scott) and a collection of essays on film, Otporna na Hollywood (Resistant to Hollywood), which earned her the honor of best film critic. Her short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies in Croatia and abroad, and currently she is working on assembling them into a collection.
IVAN SRŠEN was born in Zagreb in 1979. He has edited publications on music, politics, history, economics, and literature and has written two books of prose: Skela—bajke iz automata za kavu (The Raft—Fairy Tales from the Coffee Machine), the novel Harmatan, and he has coauthored a nonfiction work, Povijest zagrebačkih knjižnica (A History of Zagreb Libraries). Since 2007 he has been co-owner and editor at the publishing company Sandorf.
NEVEN UŠUMOVIĆ was born in Zagreb in 1972, and grew up in Subotica, Serbia. He now splits his time between Kopar, Slovenia and Umag, Croatia. His published works include 7 mladih (The Seven Young Men), Makovo zrno (The Poppy Seed), Rajske ptice (Birds of Paradise), and a short story collection, U stočnom vagonu (In the Cattle Car). A story of his was included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon.
NORA VERDE was born in Dubrovnik in 1974. Since 1998 she has been working as a journalist and editor in the daily and weekly press and in the nonprofit media in the sectors of culture, music, television, human rights, and independent media. She is the author of the books Posudi mi smajl (Lend Me Your Smile) and Do isteka zaliha (Until the Supplies Run Out), and is currently working on a story collection.
IVAN VIDIĆ was born in 1966 in Zagreb. He attended elementary and high school in Zagreb and earned his degree at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. After fighting in the war from 1991–92, he began working professionally in literature. He is a freelance artist, and writes plays, prose, and screenplays. He has written nearly twenty plays and books of prose, including Gangabanga, Violator, Ona govori (She Is Talking), and Južna država (Southern State).
ANDREA ŽIGIĆ-DOLENEC was born in Varaždin in 1966. In 2003 she was given the Forum 21 Award from the Croatian Journalists Society for her radio journalism. She writes poetry and short stories which have been published in books and newspapers. The first of them appeared in Ispod stola (Under the Table), which was published by VBZ and Transparency International Hrvatska.
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, 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 storie
s 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.